Education provides the foundation for opportunity across a wide variety of business and personal spaces. Learning and growing as an individual is something that never stops, and nurturing your passion for constant development and expanded possibility is something that will take you a long way in the world.
The importance of education can’t be overstated, but the nuanced ways in which a commitment to educational attainment and learning opportunities affects your life are often surprising and somewhat hidden. From a certificate or degree-granting online school Oregon to skill-building using YouTube as a guide, learning and education can play a huge role in your ongoing personal successes.
One way in which you can extend the learning process is with the assistance of college application help. College counselors are a fantastic resource for anyone thinking of taking their next step in the journey of formal education. Schooling creates additional opportunities for personal and financial enrichment over the long term, and millions of students move directly into collegiate classrooms after finishing high school every year as a result. There’s nowhere quite like a college campus to continue this journey, and a counselor is a fantastic asset in the application process whether you’re looking into an online school, brick-and-mortar school, or some variety of hybrid tuition that makes use of both.
Education builds pathways of understanding.
Education at all levels offers the key to unlocking greater understanding. The trouble with the learning process is that we simply don’t possess the tools to comprehend what we can’t yet understand. In an extreme example, the concept of extraterrestrial life remains mysterious and quite scary because collectively, humans haven’t encountered this unknown, and the uncertainty about the existence or nature of potential life out there in the great beyond is jarring.
The more we learn about the universe, the better we can predict what life beyond the earth might look like and how it might behave. This same theoretical framework exists in our daily lives as well. Consider instead, the banality of selecting clothing for the day ahead. When you get out of bed, you piece together a variety of different data points in order to put together an outfit that is appropriate for the day you plan to have. If it’s October and you live in Boston, you might want a jacket; June in Miami: a short-sleeved shirt. Likewise, looking out the window will give you a sense of the day’s weather beyond the inference that you make based on time and location information that lives internalized within your mind.
The more we learn, the better we become at making decisions and understanding the world around us.
Learning provides a greater empathy response.
Those who prioritize learning are often better listeners and are more reasoned in their approaches to challenges, difficulties, and stressors. This is not to say that those who decide not to pursue additional educational resources are lesser in any way, just that by choosing to continue learning, you are also ensuring personal growth over the long term. Education doesn’t stop once you leave the classroom, and it can be done in simple, effective ways that don’t require extreme effort. Watching documentaries in your spare time, reading books, and involving yourself in debates with friends about current events all contribute to an active mind that’s primed for educational engagement.
Education provides a framework for people to understand where they are right and where they have made mistakes. This is perhaps the most important gift that learning can provide to us. The downright essentiality of being able to redirect, change course, and take other perspectives on board in order to continuously seek out the truth is something that education tries to bring out of us.
We are learners and adaptive naturally, but only to a certain point. Humans actively practice something that scientists call “motivated reasoning.” This is the process by which cognitive biases “protect” us from the shattering effect that occurs when we learn that we’ve got something that we have known all our lives wrong. The trend of social media posts and memes stating “I was today years old…” captures this odd reality perfectly.
Learning is crucial for development. Make sure you are constantly growing and expanding your horizons inside and beyond the classroom.
