The Importance of Emotions in Learning

It’s commonly acknowledged in psychology circles that infants and small children need repetitiveness to develop strong neural pathways within the brain. These are crucial in later life for the acquisition of all sorts of concrete skills.

The Best Environments and Settings for Learning

Another thing that is important to note about learning, especially with children, is the timing of learning.

We’re told not to hurry them, not to engage them in learning whilst they’re in a distressed state, and to make learning as interesting and stimulating as we can.

Learning should be a positive experience.

The staid classroom environment is no longer considered the only, or best even, place in which to learn. Often the best places to learn are out in the big world touching, feeling and exploring with our senses. The younger the child, the more relevant this is.

Sure, it makes sense for us adults as we reflect on our school experiences. There’s reason for the increase in home schooling these days, which is not to say that school need be a negative setting for learning — many times it isn’t.

The challenge for parents, grandparents, teachers, and all adults — for we never stop learning — is to find the right environment and the right time to implement learning. Otherwise we’ll tend to waste our time.

It’s not so much what we learn that’s most at stake, but the desire to grow voracious learners within our children, and ourselves, that’s the key.

Not Just for the Kids

As parents or guardians and teachers we should be in less of a hurry to push children in our charge to reach predicted milestones, and be more focused on deepening the actual learning experience.

If we’ll utilise this method not only will we learn more ourselves, as people, we’ll enjoy it all the more, too. Less depression will result. More experiences will be joy-filled. And we may also find our passions.

Finally we’ll discover an internal elixir: God will be known in the learning.

Learning is the secret to life. When we find a passion and fall in love with it, learning becomes instinctual. Learning is a lifelong exercise. Further, learning is a life exercise, for when we’re learning we’re truly alive.

The best news is it’s never too late to start.

The simplest, most powerful opportunity before us, the thing to ward away many illnesses of the mind and heart, is the quest for learning. To learn is to keep moving forward. Learning is life. It’s an investment for emotional wellbeing and spiritual prosperity.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.