Jessica Stillman:

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education,” Mark Twain supposedly quipped.

It’s a catchy witticism, but while many of us remember the quote, far too many people still fail to make the distinction between “schooling” and “learning,” engineering professor, master teacher, and author Barbara Oakley believes. And that is holding us back from becoming successful lifelong learners.
Learning doesn’t always look like what you did in school

This insight comes from a fascinating and lengthy post on blog Farnam Street, which digs into how our unexamined beliefs about learning prevent us from gaining as much knowledge as we could. Too many of us, writer Shane Parrish insists, drag emotional baggage from our school days into our adult efforts at self-improvement, slowing us down significantly.

What sort of emotional baggage? The kind that associates “learning” exclusively with the focused reading, note taking, and reviewing we did as students. Any other approach to nourishing our brains tends to make many of us feel a little guilty. If we’re not staring at a book or a page of notes, we’re slacking off, we tell ourselves.