I have been thinking about the many different ways of learning.  In modern educational systems, this ideology of learning styles has come to the forefront.  In the not so distant past, school children were all expected to learn in the same way.  When a child didn’t learn the material easily, the child was often blamed.  The way in which it was presented was not even considered a possible reason for this failure to learn.  The worst part of this was that no attempt was made to do things differently.  It was the child’s fault.  

Today, we acknowledge visual learning, auditory learning, hands-on learning and cooperative learning, to name a few.  All the multiple ways of teaching children are essential to having an educated society.  To successfully compete in the job market and the world we need to understand the constantly changing information that surrounds us.  We need to have an intelligent population.

So now I come to the term, “learning by example.”  This phrase often refers to the way children learn to behave.  An infant learns how to act from the adults around him/her.  These “examples” are only as good as the people around us.  And when you are a child, you have no choice in what kind of parent, sibling, teacher, and neighbors you have.  It is the luck of the draw.

But since the most profound influence is a parent, the phrases “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” and “just a chip off the old block” were coined.  Of all the ways of learning, I believe “learning by example” is the most powerful force that influences any of our lives because it is relationship-based.  And the strongest relationship in a child’s life is their parent.

All of this means that the way to make society better is by having responsible adults around all of our children.  Of course the task of educating adults that have not themselves been given good examples is astronomical.  But in rising to this challenge, adults can make an enormous contribution to society’s future.

It is so easy for adults to throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”  But if the elders of our world would open themselves up to each opportunity that presents itself in front of young people, and take advantage of them to model respectful behavior in an obvious way, the world could become a kinder, more positive environment for learning of all kinds.  Learning and teaching by example just might be part of the solution to the problem of reaching all students and educating the population of the next generation.