by Jean Knill

Created on: November 19, 2008

If you return to education later in life, you have one real advantage - the life and work experience that has gone between. Many more mature learners don't appreciate this initially. They feel less confident among younger students, who perhaps have fewer responsibilities outside their college life.

When I decided to take up a college place at the age of 42, I found that one of the joys of this was being able to make connections between what I was learning and what I already knew. During the previous summer, while I was going through the pre-reading book list, I kept on making connections with what was in the pages. I found I was rethinking episodes from my life because I hadn't thought of them before in the manner of discussion in the book.

Although this applied not only to the philosophical works, but also in other areas, this can be demonstrated if you think of some of the more famous quotes of bygone philosophers. "Man is by nature a political animal" - Aristotle. "New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed" - John Locke. "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil" - Thomas Paine. "Man was born free, and everywhere he is in irons" - Jean-Jaques Rousseau. Now read any newspaper and you'll find you can make connections between some of these quotes and the stories they publish. Or you can remember events in your own life that bear them out.

This theme of making connections came up time and time again in lectures, seminars and tutorials. And my tutors would say that I was lucky I was old enough to have realized it. Most of their younger students wouldn't have had the experience to make the connections. I was to come to understand that there are many different ways of looking at what was happening in the world, and that all opinions are worth consideration.

There is a downside, of course. Our experiences also influence us, sometimes to the extent of prejudicing us in particular directions. So it's important to guard against this, and make a huge effort to keep an open mind.

You also have to guard against being too reliant on prior knowledge. The first essay I turned in for my media studies course at university was about aesthetics, and I had drawn much too heavily on the history of art syllabus that I had just completed, and not enough from the lectures and books for my current course. Certainly, I had made valid connections, but I was so pleased about this that they were stopping me from moving on. I was mortified when this was pointed

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