Without learning, the personalities of individuals do not grow: children, youth or mature adults. Nor is their future valid or beneficial without educated personalities, equipped with knowledge, experiences and contemporary professional skills… confident in themselves and their abilities, and enlightened in their goals and steps that are always changing towards better roles, responsibilities and behavioral results.
If food and exercise together create the health of the body and its ability to move and act, then learning develops the mind, thinking and the ability to make ambitious decisions in the future, even in a sick body or one afflicted with a limited disability. The mind is the “master of the human body”… and with learning, the mind regulates or controls the movement and health of the body, and directs the type of decisions that usually make the nature and usefulness of the future.
Without learning, learners grow up as if they were in a desolate human jungle, dominated by the struggle of individuals for physical survival, and the struggle of generations to assert the authority of adults over children in order to achieve the daily material services they need, starting with manual agriculture as was prevalent more than a thousand years ago, and ending with health care in old age and decrepitude. Then to the struggle of groups, tribes, countries or nations in order to impose the authority of the strong over the weak, and to confiscate human and material capabilities and wealth as appears in the contemporary frenzied international conflicts?!
That is, all these uneducated or ignorant parties: knowledge, inclinations, values and behavior (even if they appear otherwise on the surface), struggle to achieve a worldly need that never exceeds physical and material survival: the first need in Abraham Maslow’s ladder of human needs and in Hamdan’s pyramid of human needs as a dignified being, respectively. If these individual and collective entities, both popular and official, were truly educated, their human incentives and needs, as well as their common understandings, would rise to higher levels, such as: the constant need to gain knowledge, freedom of action, self-esteem, commitment, belonging, and achieving higher civic ambitions.
Without learning in kindergarten, most learners enter the first primary school ignorant of the basic principles of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and their learning of the prescribed methodological knowledge and skills is slowed or delayed… unlike other learners who attend kindergarten, and their superiority in primary learning is generally noted.
As for learners who are deprived, for general family or social environmental reasons, of learning opportunities in kindergartens and primary school, ignorance is sometimes observed in them in every aspect: thinking, tendencies, values, behavior, and methods of dealing with people and things..
And the most dangerous of all this is the deprivation of learners without early learning in kindergartens and then primary school, from the opportunities to form the general personal frameworks for their individual identities that are usually possible for them from the age of birth until 12 years.. As studies of developmental psychology in general confirm, and then the development of learners of daily lifestyles in which they live and interact with others, events, and things in automatic and fruitful forms: personally or socially in the present and the future alike.
As for learners without learning in middle school, they are deprived of the first real foundations of their specialized scientific knowledge, and of the opportunities to develop their scientific logical thinking that is generally necessary for learning in high school. In the reality of daily life, they clearly show superficiality of ideas and opinions, randomness in dealing with right and wrong, confusion of emotions, and a confused personality that does not know what or how or why they learn or behave in the ways they appear.
Also, without learning in high school, the doors of specializations or higher academic studies, theoretical and applied, in institutes, colleges and universities are closed to learners. Their professional or job future is reduced to the lowest cognitive and economic limits that barely enable them to survive financially or to live a subsistence life in daily life.
As for not learning at the first university level (bachelor’s), the perceptions, life and future of learners stop at the data and activities of their learning at the secondary school level, which enables them, at best, to acquire a practical manual, economic or informational skill that is average in its productive efficiency and material return, which is barely enough in general for a normal or semi-normal daily life.
In addition to that and more importantly for the future, learners without the first university education (bachelor’s), their right to continue specialized higher academic studies for master’s and doctorate degrees is confiscated, and they are automatically deprived of opportunities to achieve the individual and family self and then the general civilization of society.
In conclusion, learners without learning appear lonely in a strange population jungle, without an acceptable personal identity, nor a reliable daily lifestyle. And without a doubt without a future: personal, social, scientific, professional or a combination of them.. to qualify them to be an effective link in the chain of life and a vital material for activating and raising the usefulness of the present, and for progress as individuals, families and a civil society with a position among nations.