In today's era, the cycle of knowledge update has been greatly shortened, and all kinds of new knowledge, new situations, and new things have emerged one after another. It has been studied that before the 18th century, the rate of knowledge renewal doubled in about 90 years; Since the 90s of the 20th century, knowledge updating has accelerated to a doubling in 3 to 5 years. In the last 50 years, human society has created more knowledge than in the last 3,000 years combined. It is also said that in the era of farming, a person who reads for a few years can use it for a lifetime; In the era of industrial economy, a person who reads for more than ten years is enough for a lifetime; In the era of knowledge economy, a person must study all his life in order to keep up with the pace of the times. If we do not strive to improve the knowledge literacy in all aspects, do not consciously learn all kinds of scientific and cultural knowledge, and do not take the initiative to speed up the updating of knowledge, optimize the knowledge structure, and broaden our horizons and horizons, it will be difficult to enhance our skills, and there will be no way to win the initiative, win the advantage, and win the future.

——Speech at the Celebration of the 80th Anniversary of the Founding of the Central Party School and the Opening Ceremony of the Spring Semester of 2013 (March 1, 2013)

Further reading:

"The new leaves of the forest urge the old leaves, and the front waves of the flowing water make the back waves." Metabolism is the basic law of the development and change of things, and as far as knowledge production is concerned, its metabolism obviously has a tendency to accelerate. According to UNESCO research, in the 18th century, the cycle of knowledge renewal was 80 to 90 years; From the 19th century to the early 20th century, the knowledge update cycle was shortened to 30 years; In the sixties and seventies of the 20th century, the knowledge update cycle of general disciplines was 5 to 10 years; In the eighties and nineties of the 20th century, the knowledge update cycle of many disciplines was shortened to 5 years; In the 21st century, this cycle has been shortened to 2 to 3 years.

According to the principle of the decay of radioactive elements, a scholar put forward the term "knowledge half-life" on the alternation of knowledge between the old and the new: a person who is very knowledgeable or has rich professional knowledge in a certain field, if he no longer learns, will enter the half-life of knowledge after a certain period of time, that is, the basic knowledge is still available, and the other half of the new knowledge has become obsolete. At present, the speed of "fission" of knowledge is "a thousand miles a day", and some people estimate that the half-life of knowledge before 1950 was 50 years; In the 21st century, the average half-life of knowledge is 3.2 years, and that of senior engineers in the IT industry is 1.8 years. From this point of view, if a person does not study or stops learning for too long, he will inevitably be out of touch with the development of society. Many people encounter the dilemma of "new methods will not be used, old methods will not work, hard methods will not be used, and soft methods will not be used", the reason is that they are deeply trapped in the "half-life of knowledge" and lack the latest knowledge and skills.

Attaching importance to study is our party's tradition. As early as the Yan'an period, Mao Zedong pointed out the problem of "skill panic", he compared learning to "open a shop", there are not many things, as soon as they are sold, they are empty, and they must be purchased when they are opened, and the purchase is to learn skills.

"The Chinese Communists have relied on study to get to where they are today, and they will inevitably rely on study to move into the future." At the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Central Party School, Xi Jinping emphasized the importance of learning. There is a saying in "Shuo Yuan": "Learning is so good for talents, and sharpening is so sharpening." This means that if you want to grow your talents, you have to learn; To sharpen the blade, you have to sharpen it diligently. Xi Jinping quoted this sentence in "Zhijiang New Language", admonishing leading cadres to study more and put reading and learning in a more prominent position. In the preface to the study and training materials for the fourth batch of national cadres, he stressed: "Strive to study all aspects of knowledge, strive to increase ability in practice, speed up the updating of knowledge, optimize the knowledge structure, broaden the horizon and field of vision, strive to avoid falling into the predicament of being confused by little knowledge, blind without knowing and ignorant and confused, and striving to overcome the problems of insufficient skills, panic skills, and backward skills." ”

Xi Jinping also put forward a "battery theory": the era of only one charge in a person's life has passed, and only by becoming an efficient battery and carrying out uninterrupted and continuous charging can energy be released uninterrupted and continuously. This kind of image generalization, jumping out of the pale and boring preaching, is not only easy to understand and practice, but also can stimulate interest, so that learning itself from a passive requirement, into a way of life, a necessity for progress.