Remember being that age where being intelligent simply wasn't 'cool'? Putting your hand up to every single answer was a massive no no, and being labelled the 'teacher's pet' was probably one of the worst insults you could receieve.
Imagine how much more intelligent we would be now if we had fought against this stage. If we had asked every question that had ever popped into how our heads, or actually went to the library to read about what interested us. The trouble is that this stage has made it difficult for us to want to learn. Now we are expected to be knowledgeable, to be passionate and to be educated about our interests, but we have spent so long pretending that we don't want to do that, that we've actually fogotten how.
With knowledge comes confidence, but we live such busy lifestyles and consume so much media, that we don't always have the time to spend a few hours reading a book or watching three hour long documentaries. Luckily, the advance in media means that we don't have to, and these 4 ways show you how:
1) Unreported World
There is nothing better than a documentary that makes you feel like you have a whole new found knowledge when the end titles role. If you have the time, you can find our top documentaries here: But after a long day we can't really be blamed for not having enough of an attention span to sit through a couple of hours of factual viweing. The end of a long work day is made for guilty pleasure TV (hellooooo PLL), but you can still be educated easily if you want to be. Unreported is a Channel 4 documentary series that covers all sorts of cultural issues around the world, from bull riding to the war in Syria, and the best part? They are only 25 mintues long. Everything you need to know about a topic in under half an hour, that I think we can manage.
2) Flipboard
The trouble with being educated in a range of topics is that you are not always in the mood to learn about each one. You may not want to follow a Twitter page about politics, because lets face it who wants to see politics every single time they refresh their timeline? Flipboard is a great app that lets you pick your interests, and then presents articles surrounding those interests to you each day. The articles are presented in the style of a magazine, meaning you can literally flip through and skip the ones that don't take your fancy. Not only are all relevant articles in one place, but they are based on exactly what you are interested in and can be skipped depending on what you feel like being educated about that day.
3) TED Talks
Apparently there are people out there who do not like to read (crazy, we know). People are often put off learning through associating it with spending hours with your head stuck in a boring book, but this really doesn't have to be the case. TEDTalks are all different lenghts, on every topic you could possibly think of and for some, are a much more captivating way of learning. You know those evenings where you get seriously lost in the deep depths of Youtube? Well you can do the exact same on TED and become more educated without even realising.
4) Talking
When we think about learning we immediately associated fact. We want statistics, research or any form of hard evidence that we can trust. It's not our fault, education has pretty much programmed us this way, but the trouble is there's so much to learn about that cannot be based on fact at all. Take culture for example, the best way to learn about a culture is to expereince it, and the most effective way of doing that is talking to the people. Okay so that doesn't mean if you want to learn about France, then you need to book a trip there straight away (although we are not saying that's a bad idea), but the chances are the people you know have the knowledge you need. Sharing knowledge is one of the best ways to gain knowledge, and you can feel a whole lot smarter simply by learning what somebody else already knows.
