Since most of my learning happened in middle and late 20th century, it will be interesting to see how it stacks up against the backdrop of Circle of Learning approach or method.
Born into a lower middle class family, I would have been a farmer or attained other skills that would have used my physical skills than mental. Access to basic education was not a problem, but the kind of basic education that was available to me ranged from public to private schooling.
Even though my mother did not go beyond secondary education and my father beyond the undergrad, the support I got and the discipline with which the learning was designed and delivered and acquired was very different from today’s learning. Even though the basic education still revolved under memorizing, reading, writing and mathematics, the science and the social studies were something extra that really led my imagination fly. I dreamed of being a nuclear physicist along with an opportunity to scale Eiffel Tower in Paris if that came along. The first one did not, but the later did.
In spite of the higher education from a well-known and well-respected Indian Institute of Science, the profession pursued did not come nowhere near needing the knowledge that I acquired. I must say that I terribly failed in my A-quadrant learning to apply from what I have acquired as an Electrical Engineer. Even though I was meritorious in science, I did not get an opportunity to use the acquired knowledges in Physics and Chemistry.
Why So?
I would say it was partly due to the A-quadrant learning splattered across many knowledge bases and due to my own perception of what should be acquired coupled with the advice I got along the way.
My B-quadrant learning was hopeless. I did not meet what was expected from that quadrant till late in my professional life. I was happy with the benchmarking done by the educational institutions, and slacked entering either the C-quadrant or the D-quadrant. The start-up energy was either not there or missed the vital education from A-quadrant on how to enter C or D quadrants.
Even though the education that I got was of very high quality, the tunnel vision that was so overpowering at that time, scared me to leave the line that I was on. The constraints that were influencing my free will were too many to mention and it suffices to say that free will would have been equally bad. The education that I got was purely from the efforts of my parents (especially my father urging me to go on and on); and that has made me eternally grateful to their sacrifices.
But what did stop me from traversing the circle of learning? Was it economies of scale or was it the difficulty of access to the learnings from the rest of the quadrants or was the concept of COL purely ill-developed to even think of it as a requirement for a completion?
May be I have an answer now.