Thinking about further study? Not sure whether it is a good idea? Read on!
The advantages gained by mature aged students are in two very important areas: to the student and to society. You need to keep using your brain or your mental capacities will degenerate faster as you slide into oblivion blissfully unaware of the possibilities you could have been. Society needs your experience being put to good use - often problems are solved by people with new perspectives. Old dogs do learn new tricks especially when they are hungry.
As a mature aged student we see and take a lot more notice of what is going on around us than the average John or Mary. Hard as it is, we enjoy the swim upstream to mate and cannot bear floating downstream with flotsam and dead fish. We realize that further study, increasing knowledge, gaining skills is the way to survive and enjoy life. The hip pocket nerve does twinge a bit now and then, but missing opportunities hurts the more as time goes by. Knowing this and acting on it is the most empowering advantage there could be: something that mature aged students understand.
As a mature student, one has other advantages over younger, less mature people. Older people are generally smarter than younger people are: smarter in the sense of knowledge arrived at through experience; you know the truth of learning by experience. All of the best people in sport, in industry, in commerce have reached that level by learning through experience. Mature aged students are willing to take advice from acknowledged experts and put that new (to them) knowledge into practice. To obtain that knowledge they actually do what it takes. These students apply the Rule of Three: know what they want, understand the cost and willingly pay the price.
Few younger people understand delayed gratification as we do. Modern trends have converted the gratification from delaying into the continual agony of repaying worrying debts. Sat verbum sapienti. Fortunately, younger people eventually do come around to understanding the realities of Life: the First Law of Truthful Accounting (nothing for nothing) is a universal law. Once that is understood at a basic level, adults become mature students and a few years later, like you - mature aged students.
The two previous reasons (being smarter and delaying gratification) combine to lend strength to whatever reason we have for doing the study: whether just for the sheer pleasure of learning, for promotion at work, even for just maintaining professional registration; we are determined to learn more to our own advantage and for benefits which might accrue to others.
It has often been said that parents live through their children but the reverse is just as much true. Children and grandchildren like to boast at school; my mum is studying law wins more brownie points than my mum has long blonde hair; my granddad is learning genie Ollie gee sounds much better than my granddad smokes a clay pipe as he watches the ball game.
To conclude on a lighter note. Remember that people ten years or more, younger than you, think that you are old! In modern Western cultures, age generally has little respect given to it: respect in the sense of knowledge to be passed on. Yet cultures, which can accurately track their historical roots back several thousand years, still show considerable respect, even reverence, for the aged. My mother is still running around (well, not actually running because she had both hip joints replaced a few years back when she was 88) knows a lot more than me: she says worse things happen at sea. My wife and I and our children once spent a few weeks on a cruise ship and nothing bad happened so mother knows something I do not (still!).
Although Gordon is retired, he is busier now than ever he was teaching in secondary schools or university. He writes all his material from personal experience. His recently started website has further useful information. http://www.learntolearn.info |
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