Lifelong Learning Comes in Many Different Shapes

The movie Slumdog Millionaire is based upon a very interesting premise. A young uneducated man wins a major quiz show by correctly answering all the questions from a wide variety of categories. The promoters of the show cannot fathom how an unschooled youngster could be an expert on so many diverse topics.

The young man knew all of the answers not because he was a book learner, but because his life experiences had put him into some unique situations that revealed some snippets of information that by chance were the basis for the questions on the quiz show. His life experiences were his teacher.

On reflection, I tried to identify a number of occasions in my own life where I incidentally learned something. As a child I remember playing the card game Authors. By playing this game I became familiar with the key works of such authors as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Robert Lewis Stevenson, William Shakespeare, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sir Walter Scott, Louisa May Alcott, and Edgar Allen Poe. Without really studying them, I can still remember the key works of these authors.

In a similar vain, I was a big fan of Classics Comics as a child. Famous works of fiction were capsulized into a comic format and because of the comics, I became familiar with the plots and characters of dozens of famous books that I probably would have never read in their original form.

One of the real books that fascinated my as a child was an old tattered family atlas. I remember spending hours finding such exotic locales as Timbuktu, Cairo, Rangoon, Bombay and Katmandu. I loved to find strangely named countries such as Borneo, or strange rivers and mountain ranges. Although it is not a particularly practical skill, it probably helped establish a springboard for my passion for travel in later years.

My childhood love of movies and baseball were also the sources of a lot of incidental learning. I knew the winners of all of the Academy Award winning movies and the works of many actors from the post war years. As a huge collector of baseball cards I was familiar with the teams and records of dozens of famous and obscure baseball players from the 50s and 60s. It was all pretty much useless information except when I was forced to play the board game, Trivial Pursuit, or watch the TV-show, Jeopardy.

I am a wizard at trivial information on a lot of topics. If I had been on Who Wants to be A Millionaire and the questions had to do with authors, famous books, geography, movies or baseball I could have been a millionaire too!

On what subjects are you an expert?