Why learning as an adult is so great

It usually surprises people when I tell them I didn't enjoy school. I loved university but I hated school. As I get older, I love learning more every day.

When I talk about learning here, I mean the type that comes from courses, teachers, books, articles, research, classes, libraries, and considered exploration. There are lots of other types of learning, like on-the-job learning and learning life skills like parenting, but academic learning is what I mean.

It's a great shame that many people's academic, formal, and book learning comes to an end when they finish school or university.

My grandpa always tells me: never stop learning.

He doesn't mean for me to continue learning to gain a qualification or get a better job or earn more money, he means for me to continue learning because learning is a joy.

It's a disservice to ourselves to treat learning as a means to an end. It's what we're taught to think. We're told to work hard at school so we can own a big house when we're older. We go to university to get a sheet of paper to show employers. Our subjects are narrow and our syllabuses stilted.

One of the best things about learning as an adult is that you can, finally, do it simply because you'd like to. You can broaden your horizons and start to learn the links between topics.

Stephen King perfectly describes the reason so many of us dislike school. Learning as an adult is so enjoyable because you've ditched most of the insecurities and distractions that you had when you were younger.

I'm learning subjects I never learnt in school, like environmental science, astrophysics, and geopolitics. I'm learning the links between those unexplored areas and areas that are familiar, like law and economics and literature.

Outside of a stuffy, noisy pre-fab school building, I explore subjects that felt difficult before, like history and maths. They're not so difficult after all, and far more interesting than I'd been led to believe.

I've discovered that learning doesn't only serve as a doorway to highly paid jobs and shiny SUVs; it's a gateway to fascination and meaning.

Learning shows me things I never knew were there. The water table beneath my feet, the sacred nature of a cairn on the moor, the migration route of the robin singing on my fence.

You can use learning as a tool: to make the world better, to get a new job, to argue for change, to prove your knowledge. These uses are powerful, but the most magical thing you can use learning for is for you, to open your own mind and fill your own heart.

Imagine you're in a long corridor. The walls are lined with TV sets; all of them are on.

Closest to you are the first TVs, boxy things with small screens showing blurry monochrome footage. The further down the corridor you go, the bigger and better the picture gets. You move to colour, then to high definition. As you progress, you see 4K, 8K.

The world you see on the screen gets sharper, brighter, deeper. Everything's clearer, there's more to see. That's what learning feels like for me.

Some courses, books or avenues of enquiry barely move my feet along the corridor. I stand on the same spot, enjoying myself with what I can see in the world around me from that position.

Every now and again, though, I pick up a book or start a course that propels me down the corridor, into depth and light I haven't known before. I see new things and complexity and love in sights I've seen a million times. Things start to make sense and they look so much more interesting.

If I'm not learning I feel like I'm standing still. I get restless. Not because I feel lazy or unproductive but because I feel a sense of something great being right around the corner. When you're learning, there's always something fascinating around the corner.

You can never complete it; a degree certificate shouldn't be the end but the beginning. Everything you learn brings you new insight, a new lens through which to see the world.

There's no end to our corridor. The walls finish and the path continues out, through the trees and over the mountains, past culture and history and wonder, off into the distance over the horizon.