Learning and education are what you make of them, always

I take it back. When I was still feeling really hurt about being fired from Eisenhower I said that it is was school of last resort and that I wouldn't send my own kids there. I take that back. I was just feeling hurt. I love Eisenhower and everyone there. I love all of my friends, no matter how much they've hurt me. When they've ignored me when I've been clear that they were hurting me, that has been the most serious rupture in our relationship. Trust, as it turns out, is a two way street. It's about being trustworthy with people we care about. But it's also about having plenty of room to screw up and to learn about how to be more of what each of us needs. And that goes for everyone, including those who hurt and intimidate others intentionally as a strategy for compelling some behavior that we want.

What I thought as a kid is still true, I'm convinced. You can get a great education anywhere, depending on where you set your sights. Learning and education are what you make of them. The greatest in every field have come from a wide variety of backgrounds, even as they fruitlessly fight over which background does it better. That's what a lot of debates about education are about. There is substance in those debates, as well, as we raise our expecations of what we think all students might be capable of, and as we hope to let go the legacies of both pity and privilege that too often pollute education and American society.

I'm really concerned about how the country is talking, right now, about all of the issues we face. Education, war, wealth, inequity, terrorism, health care, all of it.

We keep escalating the rhetoric and the political fight and it keeps crowding out the more substantial debates and discussions. And we pretending both that it doesn't matter. And that none of it is connected with so many of the poor consequences that we are facing, right now - a 2-year rising violent crime rate, two quarters of slow economic growth, and a spike in the number of deaths of Iraqis and American soldiers in Iraq, right now. I have no doubt in my mind that these outcomes are connected to the escalating aggression and romanticism and fetish with aggression in America and the world, right now. It is perfectly clear to me, at this point. My only question is when will we figure it out and learn the lesson.

We learn from all kinds of sources. From teachers. From parents. From friends and family. From bosses and jobs. From books. From watching the examples and mistakes of others. From colleagues and co-workers. From lovers. From a million different experiences.

We learn and get our broader educations in this world from all over. And it is that broader education that really fills out who we are.

We learn in cities and suburbs and small towns. We learn in schools and in workplaces and in churches and in homes. We learn because it is our grappling with how to understand a world that perpetually seems beyond our reach.

A liberal education prepares us to learn in the deepest, wisest, most profound ways around the most important themes, as much as more narrow technical educations in our specified fields.

We learn everywhere.

I'm about to be head out for a theater group, EMU Theater here in Lawrence, I belong to where I learn quite a bit, really. And it reminds me that all of us have the opportunity to learn all of the most important and profound themes that we need given an openness and active reflection on a life that often is and seems beyond our grasp.

Education never ends that grasp. It just perpetually extends it.

Love,
Ben