Back when I was a boy...... I was told what to learn. Dates, facts, events, places, and names.
But I was never taught how to learn. Sure, I had teachers that tried to guide me through school and get me to be proficient enough to pass the basic requirements. That was easy for me. But I never learned how to start from nothing, without a teacher, and obtain some knowledge. Or did I.
In going through life we learn everyday. It is trial and error, gathering data, analyzing that data, and making decisions based on that data. I just never looked at school like that. It didn't help that I wasn't really interested in much as a kid.
The truth is the best motivation for learning is an interest in the subject. I suspect most of you are reading this because of an interest in radio or you are a relative. Either way, we are in a really great time to learn. The internet has made the gathering of data incredibly easy! We have so much more readily available data to us. All we have to do is learn how to find the data we are looking for, realize which data is good data (there is a lot of crap out there), and then analyze that data.
Let's take a look