All complex behaviour is learned. If we want to explain and predict behaviour, we need to understand how people learn. Learning occurs all the time.
Therefore, a generally accepted definition of learning is: “any relatively permanent change in behaviour that occurs as a result of experience.”
This definition suggests that we can see changes taking place, but we can’t see the learning itself. The concept is theoretical and not directly observable. You have seen people in the process of learning, you have seen people who behave in a particular way as a result of learning and some of you (in fact, I guess majority of you) have learned at some time in your life.
Over the years, I have received thousands of letters – at present about 50 a day. The vast majority of them contain questions that run the gamut from personal problems that beset all of us to the world problems. What these letters add up to is this: What have you learned from life that might help solve this or that difficulty?
Of course, no one is equipped with such wisdom. But the questions are questions we all meet in our lives; they are questions we must all answer in some way. Not with finality, because life is too fluid, too alive for that. So, I have been forced to stop and think through some of the questions, to try to find my own answers, to discover what I have learned by living.
When one attempts to set down in bold words any answers one has found to life’s problems, there is a great risk of appearing to think that one’s answer is either the only one or the best one. This, of course would be nonsense. There is no experience from which you can’t learn anything. When you stop learning, you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense. I honour the human race.
When it forces life head-on, it can almost remake itself. One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.
In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much I believe intensely and much I am unsure about. But this, I believe with all my heart – in the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. The choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
Surprise Elvin Basson
Weenen
