The secret

The secret to learning is so simple. It's the same secret that makes everything else more digestible. It is what makes mornings easier and nights more pleasant. It is love. Wait, don't stop reading yet. Give me a chance!

If you love something enough it becomes a part of life. We are born to love.

We love our parents because they feed us and care for us from day one. We love food because it tastes good and keeps us alive. We love doing other things for the same reasons. We are biologically designed to love. It keeps our species viable. It tingles our senses. It draws us like genies to magical lamps.

A teacher can demand respect and get some sort of facsimile, but he can cultivate love and get a genuine response. I have read books I never had any desire to even touch simply because someone I loved presented them to me as something they loved, or showed me they were the way to something I loved.

Love's like that, it sprays out over everyone around it, makes things stand out like fluorescent signs under a black light, has a scent that smells like chocolate to some and peppermint to others. Love is magical.

Love comes from the center and the first center of a classroom is the teacher. Students who fall "in love" with their teacher quickly expand that to his subject, his lessons, his viewpoint, or way of introducing that viewpoint, and if the teacher is a great one, pretty soon those students are thinking on their own and developing their own (actually educated) viewpoints.

A magical teacher loves his subject, and his students, and should you be lucky enough to meet a teacher like this, he can open the doors to the universe and everyone will fall through them into their own special niche.

Many Dick and Janes were the first keys and propagators of philosophers, neurosurgeons, architects, poets, painters and contractors. Their echoes just kept expanding until the impossible became the norm.

The luckiest people alive are those whose parents love learning. The next are those who have a teacher who genuinely loves learning. But even if someone only loves us, we are likely to feel safe enough to explore the unknown and that is what learning is all about.