Throwing Out Rules

My stepdaughter is studying to be a midwife, something I find quite interesting as it gives us a birds-eye view into the profession. Every so often she sends us a draft of a paper to review, so we get to learn along with her. Recently she sent a paper that presented an adult learning model. While the focus was on making a treatment plan meaningful to an adult patient, I found myself thinking about how I am a different kind of student as an adult than I was earlier in my life. Oddly enough, in my last blog post before I received her paper, I had written this:



I know that my learning style is experiential and crosses boundaries. It is an exploration fueled by curiosity and it requires me to keep a certain fearlessness alive; to not let myself be bound by rules that strangle creativity and to trust that I can figure out what I don't know.


Now it has taken me a lifetime to figure that out. I started my work life in an environment that allowed for that learning style and didn't realize how unusual that was. Much of my subsequent work life was in fields that were quite rule-bound, often of necessity because they were dealing with a regulatory environment. The rule-follower in me does just fine in those settings, but if you asked me where I was most creative, it was in that early open-ended environment that didn't hand me a rule book. I found it exhilarating and discovered I was pretty good at finding my way. Ironically I seldom left a job without leaving guidance for my successor. It wasn't that I was opposed to rules, they just had to make sense, which meant I had to write them.


I grew up with a father who believed that rules were there to be broken. He had a successful career doing just that. At the same time he expected us to be good students, after all, he was a college professor, my mother a teacher. I was to learn that rule breaking and being a good student exist in an uneasy tension with each other. Perhaps you need to learn the rules before you break them, yet somehow not stifle your own judgment and creativity along the way. In that early period of my life it was easier to be a good student than to break rules. As much as my father might have argued for breaking rules, he didn't mean his rules and as he liked to remind us, "When you live in my house, you live by my rules." I liked learning and was good at it, so being a good student wasn't a difficult path for me when I was young.


So what changed? I've learned many new things as an adult, many of them since I left my career and could resume my self-directed learning approach where I do best. I've learned how to do solo art shows, give speeches and teach classes, market, design websites, write blogs and books, publish a book, do genealogy consulting, build partnerships, create and manage projects of my own choosing and tell stories.

Sometimes I do pursue a more traditional learning model, particularly when I study languages. and I do selectively take art and writing classes, but mostly I learn by observing others or interviewing others who have pursued a path in which I have interest. Sometimes I consciously take a class for one purpose so I can carry it over to another. To learn to do websites, I took an on-line class through Jewishgen to develop the skills to build websites on ancestral towns. After building two of them, I applied that knowledge to building my own art website and have used it many times since for other projects, expanding my knowledge each time mostly by experimenting and doing a lot of Google searches when I'm stuck. In the age of the Internet we can learn a lot with a Google search.

So what is unique about an adult learner? The Knowles model, the one my stepdaughter introduced us to, proposes six aspects loosely paraphrased as 1) we move from dependence to self-direction. No longer in my father's house, I could create my own rules. 2) we acquire a data bank of experiences that we draw on and reference as we learn. Those experiences might support a new learning or perhaps contradict it. We test what we learn against our reality. 3) our readiness to learn is related to the tasks that we assume in our daily life, another way of saying it has to be relevant to us. 4) we focus on applying what we learn now, rather than building some future body of knowledge for a career 5) we are internally motivated, rather than externally and 6) we want to know why we need to learn something. In short, we want to know why we should care and how it is applicable to us. The corollary is we have no desire to waste our time or be bored along the way.


I think I would add a seventh item to the list that has to do with rules. While I wouldn't eliminate them totally, I would require a clear logic to be provided to justify their need, otherwise they just serve to constrain us from following a self-directed path.


There is a part of me, and perhaps all of us, that believes there is a right way to do things and everybody else seems to know it except me. That's why people go to school and get credentials. I think women are much more prone to that belief system, perhaps because we aren't taken seriously unless we have the credentials. It is constraining, and often makes us timid and silences our voice. Much of life is about figuring it out as you go along.

Ah, but the adult learner, especially those women of a certain age, have begun to figure this out. I have watched many women in their post-work life thrive with this self-directed model, finding their voice as they explore new directions quite different than those at which they once made their living.