Back to School!
Why you should embrace constant learning - now
Well, it is fall, and the beginning of a new school year. On top of that, I’m an October baby, which means that fall always feels like the beginning of the new year for me, filled with energy, opportunity, optimism! So, in that spirit, I thought we would start the new season with what I’m calling “The Back-to-School Episode!” I know, many of us won’t really be going back to school, but am I the only one who still has those dreams about being late for the final exam for the course I forgot to attend all semester, dreams that always seem to come back around this time of the year? I didn’t think so. Anyhow, in this first episode of the season, I’m going to reflect on the risks of knowing too much—or thinking you do—and, more importantly, the benefits of developing a constant learning mindset and habit.
The Story
I was never a huge Rodney Dangerfield fan, but his hilarious 1986 movie, Back to School, converted me. I saw it after returning to graduate school at the tender age of 37, and for me, the movie struck at the heart of what it feels like to return to college as a non-traditional (that is, older) student.
Back to School is about a middle-aged man named Thornton Melon, the millionaire owner of a chain of “Tall and Fat” clothing stores in New York City. Outwardly, Melon is a huge success, but his personal life is a mess. His beloved first wife died years before, and he is about to divorce his second, gold-digging and unfaithful wife. So, in need of a break, he drops everything to go visit his son, Jason, at college, only to learn when he arrives that Jason isn’t doing very well either. Melon himself had wanted to attend college when he was a kid, but he never had the chance, and he also wants to support his son, so he leaves his business in the hands of his managers and, after donating a multi-million-dollar building, is immediately admitted to the college. Much hilarity ensues, but for our purposes—a discussion of the virtues of constant learning—I want to focus on just one scene, my favorite scene in the whole movie.
Scene: It is the first day of class, and the bell has just rung. Melon and Jason arrive and take their seats in a lecture hall with theater seating that is quickly filling up with students. The class is economics, and the professor and dean of the business school, Dr. Philip Barbay, a stuffy, tweed-clad Englishman, enters holding a pointer. I’ll let you imagine Melon and Barbay’s very different accents:
Barbay: All right, settle down, people. We've got a lot to cover, and time is short. There are two kinds of people in business today...the quick and the dead. So, rather than waste your time this semester...with a lot of useless theories...we're going to jump right in with both feet...and create a fictional company from the ground up. We'll construct our physical plant...we'll set up an efficient administrative...and executive structure...then we'll manufacture our product and market it. I think you'll find it very interesting and a lot of fun. So, let's start by looking at construction costs...of our new factory.
Melon: What's the product?
Barbay: That is immaterial...for the purposes of our discussion here...but if it makes you happy...let's say we're making tape recorders.
Melon: Tape recorders? Are you kiddin'? The Japanese will kill us on the labor costs.
Barbay: OK, fine. Then let's just say they're widgets.
Melon: What's a widget?
Barbay: It's a fictional product. It doesn't matter.
Melon, muttering under his breath: Doesn't matter. Tell that to the bank.
Jason, whispering: Take it easy, take it easy. It's the first day.
Barbay: On the board, you will see a cost analysis...for construction of a 30,000 square-foot facility...which will encompass both factory and office space...and is fully serviced by all utilities...a railroad spur line and a four-bay shipping dock.
Melon: Hold it, hold it. Why build? You're better off leasing...at a buck and a quarter, a buck and a half a square foot. Take your down payment and put it into CDs...or something else you can roll over every couple of months.
Barbay: Thank you, Mr. Melon...but we'll be concentrating on finance...a little later in the term. For the time being, let's just concentrate...on the construction figures, shall we? You'll see the final bottom line requires the factoring in...of not just the material and construction costs...but also the architects' fees and the cost of land servicing.
Melon: Oh, you left out a bunch of stuff.
Barbay: Oh, really? Like what, for instance?
Melon: First of all, you have to grease the local politicians...for the sudden zoning problems that always come up. Then there's the kickbacks to the carpenters. And if you plan on using any cement in this building...I'm sure the teamsters would like to have...a little chat with you, and that'll cost you. Don't forget a little something for the building inspectors. There's the long-term costs, such as waste disposal. I don't know if you're familiar with who runs that business...but I assure you it's not the boy scouts.
[At this point, all the students in the class turn in their seats to face Melon, and start taking notes.]
Barbay: That will be quite enough, Mr. Melon. Maybe bribes and kickbacks...and Mafia payoffs are how you do business...but they are not part of the legitimate business world...and they're certainly not part of anything...I'm teaching in this class. Do I make myself clear?
Melon: Sorry. Just trying to help. That's all.
Barbay: Now, notwithstanding Mr. Melon's input...the next question for us is
where to build our factory.
And then Melon gets the last word and the class erupts in laughter when he says: How about Fantasyland?1
I have watched this scene dozens of times, and it slays me every time, not only because of how funny—and weirdly accurate—it is, but because I can sympathize deeply with both characters and the predicaments they face in class. Although Barbay knows his material and is “book smart” about business and economics, Melon has actually set up and run a successful business, starting from scratch, and has learned many more subtle lessons that cannot be found in Barbay’s textbooks. While Melon is genuinely trying to help by engaging Barbay in a conversation, he unintentionally makes the professor look like he doesn’t really understand the subject. From Barbay’s standpoint, his job is to simplify and generalize from the broad and complex world of business into a fixed number of lessons, erecting a theoretical framework that students who are new to the subject can grasp, while Melon is disrupting his lesson plan by bringing in hard-fought anecdotal experience that you couldn’t understand without having that framework to begin with. Neither of them is wrong, but they are talking past each other, one from a top-down, academic perspective and the other from a bottom-up, street-level perspective.
The reason I can sympathize with both Melon and Barbay is that I have been in both of their positions myself. First, like Melon, I have been that older student with real industry experience and knowledge, listening to a professor lecture and realizing that, in some way, I knew more than they did. When this happens, the nontraditional student faces a dilemma: A devil is standing on one shoulder and an angel on the other, and both are whispering in your ears. The devil is saying, “Go ahead, show everyone how much you know, correct the professor, ask him questions he can’t answer, and expose him as a fraud!” I always had to remind myself to ignore that voice and listen to the angel on the other shoulder, who is saying “This teacher is here for a reason, so figure out what you can learn from them by setting aside what you already know from practice, and listen for the theories and ideas that will help you place your own experience into a larger framework of some kind.” Trust me, sometimes listening to the angel is easier said than done.
Second, I can sympathize with Barbay, because, like him, I have been teaching for a long time and have also been questioned by experienced and knowledgeable students who know more about some aspect of my subject than I do. Some students are just trying to fit what they know from practice into the framework I’m teaching them. Others see the class as a stage upon which to demonstrate their knowledge, state their opinions, and engage me and the class in a debate. And once in a while, a student tries to convert class into a private lesson and discuss specific technicalities that are not relevant and that none of the other students have any reason to care about. I once had a student interrogate me about mechanic’s liens, which I understand perfectly well, but he was going into a level of detail that went far beyond what I was trying to teach in class that day, and what any of his classmates needed to know. (That student was involved in a family business, and I think he was trying to get some free help when he probably needed to pay to hire a lawyer.) In fact, I can guarantee that there are few professors out there who have not, at some point, been placed in the uncomfortable position of having a back-and-forth with a student who, in some way or another, knows more than they do—in front of the entire class. And why should this be a surprise? Many students have deep and relevant real-life experience, and, conversely, no one, even the professor, knows everything.
Both for Melon and Barbay, this scene from Back to School highlights the risks of thinking that you learned all there is to know long ago, illuminating the importance of being flexible, open-minded, and developing the habit of “constant learning.”
The Theory
Constant learning offers benefits for people at all stages of their careers, and it matters now more than ever before, as life expectancies and retirement ages continue to increase, making the knowledge gained during our formal education increasingly irrelevant.2 But some people are more inclined towards constant learning than others. A longitudinal study using a British birth cohort in their 30s and 40s found that people with the highest educational qualifications in early adulthood were most likely to engage in further learning in their 30s. These constant learners also benefited from “cumulative advantage,” where initial advantages—like developing a constant learning habit early—accrue over time, leading to higher salary growth, job satisfaction, and adaptability.3 And constant learning offers benefits that go way beyond success in the workplace. According to an article in Forbes, constant learning increases happiness and thriving, empowering us through self-determination and increasing choice and control over our lives and futures. Learning also increases self-confidence, and one study found that attending college and university increases agreeableness and likability by strengthening positive relationship-building skills. Learning builds a variety of other strengths, including resilience and motivation, broadened perspectives, decision-making skills, network building, career benefits, family achievement, health, and happiness. One study concluded that more education leads not only to greater economic achievement, but to longer lifespans.4 Indeed, constant learning matters just as much in old age as it does during your working years. One study of older adults found that lifelong learning programs played an important role in maintaining an engaged lifestyle and providing opportunities for achieving and maintaining whole-person wellness and happiness, which is associated with many other positive outcomes, including longevity, quality of life, and overall health.5
But what exactly does constant learning look like? Authors and career consultants Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis argue that “making learning a habit is vital for long-term success in a world of increasingly ‘squiggly”’ careers, where people change roles more frequently and fluidly and develop in different directions.” Further, “Learning is the intentional investment in our own everyday development, which increases our resilience and ability to adapt to change.” Learning, however, requires the ability to both unlearn and relearn.
First, “skills and behaviors that helped you get to where you are can actually hold you back from getting to where you want to be. Unlearning means letting go of the safe and familiar and replacing it with something new and unknown.”
Second, “we need to regularly reassess our abilities and how they need to be adapted for our current context. Relearning is recognizing that how we apply our strengths is always changing and that our potential is always a work in progress.”
Tupper and Ellis close with a quote from Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who emphasized the importance of constant learning over fixed knowledge when he said:
“Learn-it-all will always do better than the know-it all.”6
The Lesson
Be a constant learner. Do it not just for career success, but for health and happiness over your entire lifetime. Start by learning to listen better, and by listening to the young and the old. Nurture old friendships, but pursue new ones, too, and with different kinds of people. Read and consume information broadly. Develop hobbies and interests outside of your professional and educational disciplines, and start taking lessons in something you have always wanted to learn (for me, it’s been piano). Use everything you learn to enlarge your mental framework. Stay flexible and open-minded. Don’t assume you know everything—you don’t. Don’t be afraid to ask questions or say, “I don’t know,” or “What do you think?” Start developing a habit for constant learning. Now.
I’ll close with two quotes:
“Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.”
- Peter Drucker, Consultant, educator, and “father of modern business management.”
“In the school I went to, they asked a kid to prove the law of gravity, and he threw the teacher out of the window”.
- Rodney Dangerfield
Post Scripts:
1. Whenever someone wants my advice about going back to school in their 30s or 40s, I tell them to watch Back to School and then come talk to me.
2. This scene from Back to School reminds me of my own course, private sector real estate development, even including the things Barbay writes on the board about construction costs. In fact, for years, I kept a tab on my course website called “humor,” which included a link to this scene on YouTube.
3. And I love when Melon, ever the business man, hires Kurt Vonnegut on a consulting basis to write a paper for him about…a Kurt Vonnegut novel. When he gets an F because it is obvious to the professor that it is not his work, he orders his loyal lieutenant, Lou, to claw back the fee from Vonnegut.
3. Rodney Dangerfield was hilarious right up to the end, and even in death. The epitaph on his tombstone reads:
RODNEY DANGERFIELD
THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD
My thanks to Drew at Drew’s Script-O-Rama for painstakingly transcribing the script using the screenplay and multiple viewings of Back to School.
Ates, Haydar and Kadir Alsal, “The Importance of lifelong learning has been increasing,” in Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 46 (2012) 4092-4096.
Jenkins, Andrew, “Cumulative advantage and learning in mid-life, Studies in Continuing Education, 2024, 46(1), pages 121-138.
Brower, Tracy, “Learning is a Sure Path to Happiness: Science Proves It,” in Forbes, 10/17, 21, accessed at https://www.forbes.com/sites/tracybrower/2021/10/17/learning-is-a-sure-path-to-happiness-science-proves-it/
Obhi, Hardeep K., Amanda Hardy, and Jennifer A. Margrett, “Values of lifelong learners and their pursuits of happiness and whole person wellness,” in Aging and Mental Health, 2021, 25(4), pages 672-678.
Tupper, Helen and Sarah Ellis, “Make Learning a Part of Your Daily Routine,” in Harvard Business Review, 4 November 2021, https://hbr.org/2021/11/make-learning-a-part-of-your-daily-routine.