What if it’s ok to love learning?

A guest post from Holly Brown

Exploring Life and Literature

Dear friends,

During the months of December and January, Beyond the Bookshelf is exploring the idea of Lifelong Learning. This topic is near and dear to my heart and is intimately tied to my love of literature. However, I wanted to hear from others what their perspectives were on the topic. Back in September, I put out a call for guest submissions on the topic. The response was overwhelming and I am excited to host the third of those guest essays today.

Holly A Brown

lives in rural South Yorkshire, UK, with her husband Tom and their 18-month-old son. They live in a village overshadowed by a medieval castle and Anglo-Saxon church, which Holly considers the perfect locale for a medieval historian to call home. She spent close to a decade teaching primary school but took a break when her son was born. Now, in addition to raising a child, she is studying for her DPhil in Archaeology. She loves to be outdoors, running or hiking in the mountains when she has some spare time. These open places give her space to breathe and refocus her mental energies.

Holly has always considered reading to be an essential component of her life as it is closely tied to her core value of lifelong learning. She typically keeps a non-fiction book of some sort on the nightstand but is also passionate about reading fiction. Like many of us, her life has had its challenges and fiction can often provide an escape from that weariness. She enjoys recommending books to others and recently enjoyed Dark Earth by Rebecca Stott.

Please enjoy Holly’s essay below.

Holly Brown

For the first few years of their lives, children go through a dramatic transformation. Born utterly helpless and dependent on their caregivers, within three or four years typically-developing children are able to communicate, engage in self-care, and express their individuality. Asking endless questions once they start talking, they are hungry for knowledge, curious about everything.

I had the privilege of teaching young children for almost a decade and amongst the joy of being alongside children each day, I witnessed a rather more disheartening transformation. The bubbly, enthusiastic, self-assured three-year-olds that joined us would, more often than not, become angry, self-conscious, uncertain eleven-year-olds.

What happens in those intervening years?

I remember reading a Note on Substack a few months ago that said that many of the people creating in this space were those who’d had the following phrase written repeatedly in their school reports: ‘A quiet member of our class, X would benefit from contributing more to lessons.’

I’ve rarely resonated with something so deeply.

You see, I was one of those children.

Well, one of those teenagers.

I too had been bubbly and enthusiastic during my younger years. Curiosity dominated my early learning experiences and I had that insatiable desire to know more and do more that epitomises so many children.

And yet by the age of eighteen I too had decided that it wasn’t cool to be too keen.

Or rather, I’d been told that it wasn’t cool to be too keen.

During the intervening years I had lived in six different countries across the Middle East, South-East Asia, and Europe. Moving to England at the age of ten, I was once told on the playground that no one was interested in hearing about where I’d lived before; they didn’t want to know.

How could they not want to know? I wasn’t sharing my experiences to show off; it was an essential part of who I was, who I am even to this day. How could they know me if I couldn’t share where I’d come from?

I pretty much shut down there and then.

Though I’d previously visited England during the school holidays, I had never lived in a ‘western’ culture. I didn’t know the social codes, the food was weird, and it was so, so cold. I was already trying to work out, on my own, how to navigate this sixth new country of my life, and that playground conversation convinced me there and then that this was not the kind of place I wanted to invest in.

I decided that I wouldn’t really make friends because I wasn’t going to live there long-term. As soon as I could, I’d be on a plane back to Asia. I just had to keep my head down, get through school, become an adult, and then I was free to leave.

And what I definitely wouldn’t do was share the burning passion I had for History. I had seen the mockery that rang out across when someone seemed a little too keen to learn and I did not want to add that to my burdens.

Keep my head down, that’s all I had to do.

For the entirety of my secondary school experience, teachers tried to get me to speak more in class, thinking that this engagement would help me to learn more effectively. As an educator myself, I understand the theory behind this: a sign of mastery is when we are able to explain something to others, whilst critical thinking in discussion is a crucial element of historical study.

What they didn’t know, though, was that I was on fire internally. Having shut myself off from others, my curious and creative mind was going into overdrive. Books were my friends and I would spend hours reading them – alone, of course. I visited historical landmarks and wrote my own stories – again, alone, of course. I even watched every single episode of ‘Time Team’, the British archaeology programme that ran from 1994 to 2014 – alone, of course, in secret, because I knew that others would laugh at me if they found out.

And I just needed to keep my head down, not give them any fuel for mockery.

It was only in my later 20s that I finally gave up caring what others thought about my passion for learning.

2020 was a rough year for many of us, and aside from the pandemic, it was also the year that I fell headlong into my first mental health collapse. Looking back on it now, I realise that this was probably, at least in part, the result of trying to be someone I wasn’t for close to 20 years. There’s only so long a person can squash down who they truly are.

When the world shut down and we were locked in our homes, I decided that my word for the year would be abundance. What did this look like for me? I would pursue abundance in all the things that brought me joy: reading history books; studying History; watching history programmes; listening to history podcasts. No one could see, after all.

I had always wanted to be an academic historian, writing books to show others that History can be fun, interesting, and not just about kings and battles.¹ In 2021, I began studying for a master’s degree in History at the University of Cambridge. The epitome of geek chic, right?

Yet something had changed within me during those pandemic years.

Maybe it was the antidepressants, or more likely the talking therapy that dived deep into my past. Either way, I no longer felt I had to hide in order to keep myself safe from the world.

Being fully me meant embracing the fact that I love learning and I especially love learning about history.

After all, I am a deeply curious soul.

I am in everything I do, for curiosity doesn’t just reside within the classroom.

Sure, I have the privilege of being able to study, now, for the DPhil in Archaeology that I have always dreamed of, at the university currently ranked top in the world². Behind that, though, lies the question ‘what if?’ What if I embrace the fact that I love a rather nerdy subject, rather than hide it? What if I apply for the master’s degree that I wanted to do, rather than stay stuck in a job that just didn’t feel right? What if I use my baby’s nap times to write a history newsletter on this new platform I’ve heard of?

What if it’s ok to love learning?

Lifelong learning is intertwined with an attitude of curiosity that leads us to ask the what if questions without shame or embarrassment.

For me, it’s looked like pursuing a career in academic research and writing books.

But it doesn’t have to look like that for everyone.

For me, at least, it’s about that attitude of curiosity – and that can exist anywhere.

The bulk of my teaching career was spent working with children with learning difficulties who remained in mainstream education. One pupil will always stick with me.

Thomas (not his actual name) liked to be called Thomas, but I noticed that he would always label his work Tom. I asked him about it one day, and he said that he could never remember how to spell Thomas but could remember Tom. This child was eight years old and had such profound learning difficulties that he couldn’t spell his own name.

He was, however, an exceptionally talented artist. Not in a ‘could hang his paintings in the National Gallery’ kind of way, but I could see the seeds of his gift in the drawings he doodled during lessons.

So I asked myself, what if that’s what he’s supposed to do?

I don’t know where he is now; he’ll likely be 16 or 17 years old. But judging by the face that greeted me after the first art course that I nominated him for, I sincerely hope he made it through those brutal teenage years staying true to himself. I hope he fought against the temptation to hide his difference, his passion, and become someone else in an attempt to placate his peers.

I hope that he, too, embodies that same attitude of curiosity, that same passion for learning within the area of life that brings him most joy, that I tried to foster in all my students and only recently came to embrace myself.

For it is by cultivating that attitude of curiosity, across all of life, that we have the best chance of being lifelong learners once we leave the classroom. I have, admittedly, only been walking this earth for 31 years so far. I hope to have many more years ahead of me, but what I hope most is that on my final day here I can say, hand on heart, that I never stopped learning.

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You can read more of Holly’s writing and research at her publication. 

Beyond the Bookshelf is a reader-supported publication. If you are looking for ways to support Beyond the Bookshelf, please visit my support page and see the ways you can help continue the mission of exploring the connection between life and literature.

Until next time,

1. The tagline for my newsletter on Substack, Telling Their Tales. Now thoroughly healed from my teenage angst, we dive headlong into the geeky-ness of History in all its nerdy glory.

2. According to this league table, though of course they differ: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/latest/world-ranking