Transcriber: Ola Żądło Reviewer: Anna Sobota
The journalist Sidney Harris once said
that the purpose of a great education
is to make your mind a pleasant place in which to spend your leisure time.
I love that quote because it leaps over
the most mundane point of education,
getting a job,
and lands on the higher purpose of making your mind
a constantly enriching playground,
constant connections, new knowledge, open to new knowledge,
and a deeper understanding of the world around us.
Now I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of teaching
on three semester at Sea voyages.
This is a study abroad program on a beautiful floating campus -
a big, gorgeous ship that sails around the world
with about 500 undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 22.
But what's most remarkable to me about this voyage,
aside from these wonderful young people,
is that there’s always a small contingency of lifelong learners -
most in their retirement, audacious, curious, fun-loving people.
These are people that choose to go on a study abroad program
in which they learn about the people and places that we’re sailing to,
not booze cruisers and shuffleboard ships.
They’re people that have mastered the art
of seizing the day through lifelong learning.
I’m always so excited when at the back of my world music classes,
there's the entire group of lifelong learners.
Not because of anything particular about the difference between the students,
but because of what they bring to the program.
They teach the students that learning constantly in community,
with each other, no matter what your age,
is the biggest secret to keeping your mind alive
and your personal relationships healthy.
And what they show me, what they make perfectly clear to me,
is that the two most comparable stages of your life,
believe this or not,
is when you go to college and when you start your retirement.
And I’ll tell you why.
In both those precious moments, you ask yourself,
what am I going to do with the rest of my life?
In college, it’s what am I going to do for a job, for a paychecks?
In retirement it’s what am I going to do
for my personal fulfillment and my enrichment?
If you divide your life into three stages,
three acts like a beautifully defined play
or the three movements of a gorgeous piano concerto,
your youth is your first act, your career is your second
and your retirement is your third.
And in the youth you can ask, what do I want to do with my career?
But in retirement you can say, what is my purpose?
I think most of us could define ourselves by our purpose
and unfortunately, our purpose is often defined by a job title.
This is quite sad because, in fact, that job title often depends
on how fortunate you are to receive a good education
or how unfortunate you are to receive a weak one.
And in fact, what happens then is that
we have the first act of our lives to discover, the second to deliver,
and the third to decay.
And really, that’s not how it should be and it needn’t be like that.
And it’s what contributes a lot to the reason
that there is a stigma to aging in so many cultures.
In some cultures, the youth do not respect elders
because they see them as having served their purpose.
This perceived notion of decay is an incredibly unfair situation
because in fact, if you don’t get seen as a good learner,
you don’t see yourself as a good learner, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s the same for the elderly as it is for schoolchildren, we know this.
If a school child's ability is recognised and nurtured, they thrive.
If it’s ignored and neglected,
they falter.
The thing about the lifelong learners on the ship
is that they have they’ve learnt the secret of lifelong learning
and that they can thrive in this way.
In some cultures, they respect the elderly.
In fact, in some traditional societies,
the elders are so respected as seen as wise
[for] the wisdom and the experience that they bring
and they are treated as such.
In Sweden and Finland, there are robust social programs set up
to celebrate the elderly
so that they have a fulfilling elder years.
In places like Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, in Vietnam,
or in Seoul, in South Korea,
you can see playgrounds with equipment for the elderly to play on
or to play games in.
And frankly, playing games and learning,
and exercising is not childlike,
it’s human.
Retirement used to suggest hanging up your hat,
giving up your dreams,
losing your creativity, losing your initiative,
losing your mind.
Cognitive psychologist and research has shown us
that, in fact, it’s just the opposite.
That in fact, a great deal of your brain can become more and more agile
the older you get because you’re constantly building on the neural networks
of your cognitive experiences and your knowledge.
And this is what the lifelong learners on the ship know.
Nowadays, the retirees have learned to sort of got into the secret
that the older you get,
the more you can get your third act together.
(Applause and laughter)
Retirees are getting the degrees they’ve never finished.
They’re taking the art classes they’ve longed to do all their lives
but didn’t have time for.
They’re picking up musical instruments.
They’re running marathons, they’re climbing mountains.
And they're writing their memoirs.
I know an 86 year old professor and colleague of mine
who is still teaching full-time and is loving every minute of it,
and he’s as interesting as he ever was.
And he’s doing what he loves in his retirement.
Then, there’s the 87 year old beautiful diva
that used to love going to the rest homes to sing show tunes to the old folks
who were much younger than her.
(Laughter and applause)
And then, there’s the 90 year old filmmaker
whose strange friendship I treasure so greatly,
who now makes documentaries on wildlife, when in fact,
he had a very successful career in training videos in the corporate world.
And those lifelong learners, I told you about on the ship,
I can assure you they bring as much to the classroom
as any of the course materials in it
because they show the students that learning together
keeps your mind awake
and that there’s no end to the learning you can do in your third act.
There's an old proverb that says that societies are great when they plant trees
whose shade they know they will never sit under.
I’d like to extend that proverb and say that societies grow even greater
when they invest in people for the fulfillment of their lives,
not some sort of return on investment.
Imagine if we had a new paradigm of thinking about
the third act of our lives as the greatest adventure of all.
That your youth, your first act, is your bronze medal.
And your career, your second act, is your silver.
And then, oh, my,
there comes the third act, the great glorious gold medal.
(Applause)
I personally think that lifelong learners are the coolest people on the planet
because they’ve learnt how to get their third act together.
Have you?
Will you?
I wish you all a triumphant third act.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)