Holistic Learning

This ebook by Scott H. Young (available for free online through that link) is very short, very readable, and offers a simple and potent introduction to some of the principles of, as it says on the tin, holistic learning. This is basically a whole approach to education which forms frameworks of understanding with a fundamental expectation that things within these frameworks, and even the frameworks themselves, will be interconnected, once you find out enough about them or the objects of their understanding. This is radically at odds with the conventional model of modernistic education, which breaks the world down into fields which one has to specialise in further and further until you can genuinely struggle to find ways in which people who effectively study the same thing from different perspectives can find common ground upon which to discuss the things they both study, because breaking fields down and compartmentalising information and understanding is not conducive to cross-pollination - which means you have to sort of decide to become a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none before you can start linking things into some kind of bigger picture. It's challenging, and frankly given the sociocultural and political-economic order currently prevalent I don't see the models of education (which are deeply reductive; subjects become mere information for the sake of specialised career paths, and I don't see genuine self-driven collaborative free-thinking learning stuff pushed very far in most educational institutions today*) changing much very soon. But hey, big picture, things are changing all the time, particularly quickly and unpredictable at the moment, so never say never. I'd strongly recommend looking through this book if you want some genuinely helpful tips that will help you cultivate an approach to learning which will help you do it naturally and organically all your life; maybe like me you're lucky enough to already have that kind of approach to learning, maybe you know it's within your potential but schools and college and whatnot never unlocked your capacities for curiousity to enough of an extent for you to really get into the swing of it. But it's never too late! Well, unless you're in some kind of vegetative state, in which case good on you for managing to read this blog - and watch out for bedsores.

* The Philosophy and Politics Departments at the University of Sheffield (where I undertook half** my undergraduacy and a part-time Masters in Global Political Economy) being thankfully something of an exception.

** The other half being economics, to which the above critique was entirely fair.