Quote of the Week...from Abraham Maslow

Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.      ---Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow...today is his birthday (he'd be 124 if still alive) was a twentieth-century American psychologist who created the "Pyramid of Needs", the base of which represents people's physical needs and the very top comprising self-actualization.  He also emphasized that self-actualizing people tend to have more of the "peak experiences" in life that many long for, as well as develop an outlook leading to the longer-lasting "plateau experiences" of inner well-being.  I found his above quote about learning "in and of itself" to be an affirmation of how I also have regarded it over the years...and frees education from the tyranny of ego-based, hierarchical judgment that formalized school training tends to foist upon hapless students compelled to endure it, first through compulsory education in the K-12 years and then on to college for career preparation.  I have also tended to be something of a renegade with education, and this did not carry over well into the much more rigid structure imposed by teachers and curricula in school settings...but after leaving school I've experienced great joy at learning different things, without someone standing above poised to beat me down should I stumble in my exploration or diverge from a topic they were promoting.  When I was young, information was available but difficult to come by...nowadays the Internet has opened the door wide to knowledge, and with platforms like YouTube it is possible to learn to do just about anything and even attend virtual classrooms.  Sadly, there are lots of folks who only see the value of learning anything in how they can make money from it...I've been confronted in the past when such a person would spy me studying something that, to them, had no discernible "value".  The problem with their perspective is that they tend to see their own self-worth in terms of increasing wealth and social prestige...should they one day find themselves unable to continue that way, I'm afraid the whole house of cards that sustains their ego-based self-image could collapse.  But let's just skip over some of the psychological jargon I've brought up and cut to the chase: learning, simply put, is fun!