Incidental learning

The American pragmatist Richard Rorty said somewhere that a university was a place where you could find any book on any subject and someone to discuss it with. I think that's a pretty neat idea; a similar point was made rather forcefully by the protagonist in the film Good Will Hunting. I think learning is something that happens (or doesn't) and like all good things in this universe can not be forced. Growing up in a house with many curious books and interesting magazines and stuff lying about learning came to me naturally. A true treasure came my way some time in my preteen years when my uncle moved to Canada to do his PhD in Biology. He left behind a large stack of records. Pink Floyd, Supertramp, Frank Zappa, Bugsy Malone.... and shyly I dove in and tried  listening to most of it. This profoundly influenced me and opened up a world of possibilities, to do with ways of making music, but also to ways of thinking and being hitherto unimagined.... and though the music per se was great it was also this feeling of being privy to something weird and wonderful, shared by me and the universe (and of course my uncle .... ) . I've (mostly) enjoyed being a student and then a teacher; but I find that the most important learning takes place in a personal way and incidentally - you follow a path where you meet your clues and build your self into something completely unique - you may choose to share some of it - other things you keep secret. My friend who is a historian once told me a story of a guy who kept a diary all his life, and on the day before he died he burned it; leaving all that information and history to blow in the wind. My friend is an unusual historian because he found this to be an intensely beautiful story, and I sort of get that, I'm not sure though....

Some are of the opinion that this sort of incidental learning is under threat with the advent of the net - but I am not. The way someone stumbles across something weird and interesting, like my blog for instance, can be part of something new in this person's weird and wonderful tale of being....