Lifelong Learning

The wiki grounds this idea in a single passage from Walden, where Henry David Thoreau argues that education should not stop at adulthood: “It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure — if they are, indeed, so well off — to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.” Thoreau’s image reframes a town’s older residents not as people whose schooling is behind them but as standing scholars, and casts the whole community as a place of continuing study.

Context: “Lifelong learning” is the general idea that intellectual growth and self-education are continuous across an entire life rather than confined to formal schooling in youth — a recurring theme in self-cultivation, adult-education, and Stoic/transcendentalist traditions alike.

Where this appears

• Walden — Thoreau’s call for “uncommon schools” and villages-as-universities, where elders keep pursuing liberal studies “the rest of their lives.”