What do you love learning about?

The love of learning is a thing of beauty, a great gift, something to marvel at. If children develop a love for learning, they will become lifelong learners—and continuous learners tend to be successful at everything they turn their attention to.

Wherever you find excellence, you find continuous learning. They go hand in hand. Wherever you find that continuous learning is missing, you find mediocrity.

Saint Isidore of Seville was a man of excellence. He was a man who loved learning.

Isidore was born into a family passionate about the Church and gaining wisdom. His brother, who would become Saint Leander, imbued in the young Isidore a love for learning, and nurtured this love as the years went on. 

Named Archbishop of Seville around 600 AD, Isidore embarked on a mission to preserve knowledge of the ancient world. His magnum opus, the Etymologiae, was an ambitious encyclopedia that sought to encapsulate the entirety of human understanding in twenty volumes.

Isidore did not amass wisdom only for himself. He founded schools, championed the liberal arts, and promoted a curriculum that not only taught wisdom, but kindled in young people a love of learning, which they would keep for their whole lives. Many of these young people became saints, because Isidore taught them at a young age to love learning. He knew that to educate children requires strength, but it also requires a gentleness. Their little souls need to be handled with care. We are all different, we all develop at different speeds, and we all have different gifts. Saint Isidore of Seville nurtured those gifts, and soon those children were educating themselves, just for the love of it.

Whatever your age, if you have not yet fallen in love with learning, begin that love affair today. How? Go wherever your interests lead you. It is the perfect place to start. Rekindle a childlike curiosity. Ask why a lot. Free yourself from outcomes; you don't need a reason and you don't need to accomplish anything. Once you fall in love with learning, amazing things become possible.

Patron Saint of: Students, The Internet, Computers, and Coders

Symbols: Bees

Feast Day Shared By: Saint Benedict the Moor