There are few subjects in this world I can say I TRULY feel confident about discussing, and role of education in our lives is one of them. I am PASSIONATELY EVANGELISTIC about the "gospel of learning" and why it is so important for us to continually expand our minds, to enlarge our perspectives, and to further our knowledge of ourselves and the world around us, regardless of how old we may be or what we may do for a living. Even after all the years I spent in college, seminary, and graduate school- doing research, listening to lectures, and pouring out one term paper one after another, I know I'll STILL be a student--reading, writing, asking questions, seeking answers--right up till the day I die. One of the greatest endowments any parent or teacher could ever bequeath a child is an incurable thirst for learning and knowledge, an insatiable curiosity about life and God's world, a profound sense of awe and wonderment before all those great mysteries that fill us within and encompass us without, WITHOUT which, learning becomes virtually impossible.

I've always had a naturally inquisitive mind- always questioning where things come from and how they work, why some things happen and why others don't. I grew up with four newspapers in my hand every day- two in the morning- the New York Daily News and the Newark Star Ledger, and two evening papers- the New York Post and the Perth Amboy Evening News which I delivered after school for several years. The local library became my second home as two to three times a week, I'd be plopped down in the middle of the library floor with books piled up all around me. I particularly enjoyed biographies, especially the lives of the great inventors like James Watt, Robert Fulton, Elias Howe, and Thomas Edison; I wanted to invent things just like them. One time, I made a crystal radio and another time, I devised a small electric motor out of bits of wire and a tin can. I even fashioned a small mini-bike using parts from my father's wheelbarrow and lawnmower (which later earned me a good tongue-lashing). Essentially, I’ve always viewed life as a giant challenge and it's the constant hunger for answers and the discovery of more and even GREATER questions that has made our world so immensely fascinating to me.

I'm convinced that, to varying degrees, every one of us possesses that same innate curiosity, that very same instinct for inquiry, and what's MORE, that it's part of God's imprint upon our souls. This need to understand the world around us, to test our limits and then transcend them, to never settle for simply the obvious but to continuously strive for deeper and better answers, to discover who we are, where we've come from, and where we're going- such questions, I believe, arise from the "imago dei," the image of God pressed into our very nature. But if we FAIL to nurture that quality, if we just go on stifling the creative urge to search and question and challenge ourselves, if we become simple conformists, blindly accepting everything people hand us, then life will steadily become dull and stale and unimaginative; this creation will lose that unique sense of awe and mystery that renders everything so interesting. And when THAT happens, then it's just a short time before GOD becomes EQUALLY dead and irrelevant to us.

However, the delight of learning should never be confused with going to school. There are students sitting in classrooms all across this country who are not in the LEAST interested in cultivating their imagination or deepening their knowledge or enlarging their curiosity about the world. Such persons are chiefly practical for they know that with good grades comes a better job. They're interest in education is solely to increase their value in the labor market, to enhance their prospects of a higher paying occupation. Rather than learning for learning's sake, their PRIMARY interest is a good resume. These persons would do well to read Neil Postman's book The End of Educationis which he argues that the objective of education is to focus on "how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living."

Three weeks ago, Oprah Winfrey delivered an impassioned commencement speech to the graduates at the University of Southern California. She emphasized the need for them to work hard in their first jobs, no matter how unglamorous their employment situation might be. She told them that their job is not always going to fulfill them, that there will be days that they just might be bored or not even feel like going to work AT ALL- but they should go all the same and STILL give their best. However, she then added this caveat: WHATEVER you do for a living, your job is not who you are- it’s just what you’re doing on the way to who you will eventually become. Their job is not meant to define who they are, that is, it is not intended to determine whether they are successes or failures in life. There certainly are plenty of people in the business world and the entertainment industry who easily earn seven-figure salaries and yet who feel lost, unhappy with themselves and their considerable achievements. On the other hand, there are others who earn far less and yet find contentment because they understand that their fulfilment and happiness does not originate with their jobs or depend upon them as it does from the quality of their relationships, from the love they give and receive from others in their lives. The fact is that we have given our jobs and careers and the striving for them TOO MUCH POWER over our lives with the result that we are much the poorer for it!

When I first entered college almost half a century ago, I found myself taking classes like French Film, German Existentialist Literature, Introduction to Philosophy, and Playwriting. My father, a practical man who felt himself fortunate just to finish high school, hadn't the slightest clue as to what to advise me of. He asked me what classes I had registered for and when I informed him, his face screwed up into a question mark as he inquired, "But David, is this going to help you get a good job when you graduate?" My father, a child of the Great Depression, could only see education as a means to a more secure future while I, a child of the '60s, saw education foremost as a means for developing the self- for questioning my most basic assumptions and developing a more comprehensive philosophy of life.

Bill Bennett, former Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration, related in an article for U.S. News & World Reporthow when he first arrived at college as a young freshman, he had definite ideas as to how he wanted to use his four years of higher education. He wanted to major in English because as he puts it, he "wanted to become sophisticated." You see, HIS idea of sophistication, he believed, would land him a good job and allow him to make big money.

However, the college required all students to take an Introduction to Philosophy course during their first semester. Reluctantly, he took the course, never realizing how it would eventually change his life. He had a professor who had a knack for making such seemingly useless, abstract material actually become living wisdom. Challenged by Plato's Republic, it seemed to Bennett and his classmates as if the philosopher had become reincarnated right before their very eyes. Well, he was hooked. Something happened to them that first semester as they struggled their way through the Republic, arguing about basic notions of right and wrong. Confronted with a great text and a great teacher, they found themselves caught up in the serious enterprise of raising and wrestling with life's most profound and decisive questions. Wrote Bennett:

"Every student is entitled to that kind of experience at college. And if I could make one request of future undergraduates, it would be that they open the door to that possibility. College should shake you up a little, get you breathing, quicken your senses and animate a conscious examination of life's enduring questions. Know thyself, Socrates said. Higher education worthy of the name aspires to nothing less than the wisdom of that dictum."

Some years ago, two hundred doctors, lawyers, businessmen, university professors, politicians, and writers returned to the University of Notre Dame to pay homage to a man who had died almost twenty years before. His name was Frank O'Malley and he had been their English instructor at one time or another during the four decades he taught at the school. A shy bachelor whose bed was always lumpy with books, O'Malley never earned a doctorate, never taught a graduate seminar or wrote a book himself. After entering the university as a freshman in 1928, he was never to live anywhere other than in a campus dorm. But O'Malley was no Mr. Chips. His obligation as a teacher, he once wrote, was to assist "the unique working out to manhood of each soul," chiefly by demanding that each student wrestle with the meaning of great literary texts. At the start of every year, he memorized each student's name and had each submit a brief autobiography so he could understand them better. Years afterward, O'Malley could still recall their names and the quality of their work.

To be an English major, O'Malley insisted, "is a way of life." Deeply religious and contemptuous of specialists, he regarded literature and its criticism as cultural forms by which the imagination makes sense of human existence. He electrified his students, helping them to negotiate their way through Milton, Blake, the Romantics, and the Moderns. His reputation was such that serious students in science, engineering and business signed up for his courses as well. For decades, his elective on Modern Catholic Writers was the university's most popular class. Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and Virginia Woolf; Gerald Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Graham Greene- all were used to illustrate his favorite theme: the brokenness of human nature and the redemptive value of human suffering. Said Dr. William J. Cashore, a pediatrician in Providence, R.I., "Frank O'Malley taught me more about patients and their needs than anything I ever learned in medical school."

Like Bill Bennett and like those former students of Frank O'Malley, I ALSO know what it is to have had such a special teacher touch MY life. When I was in seminary, Professor Robert Goeser's class on Martin Luther at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley changed me for good. Bob was a short man in his mid-fifties who always entered the class sartorially dressed in his salt and pepper tweed jacket. But by the time class was over, his jacket and tie were off, his shirt hung out of his pants, and he was covered with perspiration- looking more like he'd just been in a dogfight than conducting a seminary class on Reformed Theology. The fact was that he was so FULL of Luther that he BECAME Luther right in front of us. He taught us that theology did not have to be dull, that they addressed many of the same questions that we wrestle with every day. He often drew examples from great literature--from such figures as Shakespeare, Dickens, Eliot, Twain, and Conrad--in order to underscore his points. He was both a masterful interpreter and communicator, and a primary reason I returned to school years later to pursue a Ph.D was because I wanted to inspire others in the same way this man had inspired ME. After graduation, I didn't quite miss seminary as I did Bob Goeser. He died a couple of years ago from Alzheimer’s Disease so he never got to know that I dedicated my doctoral dissertation to him, but still a day rarely goes by when I don't think of him, his classes, and the huge influence he continues to exert upon me.

William Bennett, Frank O'Malley, Robert Goeser- all attest to the joy and excitement of learning, especially in discovering philosophy and great literature. Such works tell us how men and women of our own and OTHER civilizations have grappled with life's most relentless questions: What should be loved? What deserves to be defended? What is noble and what is base? To quote the French essayist Montaigne, a student should have the chance to learn "what valor, temperance, and justice are; the difference between ambition and greed, loyalty and servitude, liberty and license; and the marks of true and solid contentment." Bennett asks:

"And why is it important to expose oneself to the best in history, science, literature, mathematics and foreign language? And how will it help someone majoring in business or engineering or pre-med studies? As Hamlet said, "readiness is all." In the end, the problems we face during the course of a career are the same kind that we face in the general course of life. If you want to be a corporate executive, how can you learn about not missing the right opportunities? One way is to read "Hamlet." Do you want to learn about the dangers of overweening ambition? Read "Macbeth." Want to know the pitfalls of playing around on the job? Read "Antony and Cleopatra." The importance of fulfilling the responsibilities entrusted to leadership? Read "King Lear." In the modern world, there is still nothing more instructive than a full, well-rounded liberal arts education, one that combines such subject matters as literature, science, history, math, philosophy, and language. They can help mature minds come to grips with the age-old issues, the problems that transverse every plane of life. Such students will not only enliven their spirits and broaden their minds, they will more than likely profit in every OTHER endeavor as well."

Now, I'm not saying it's WRONG if your prime interest in education is to improve your job prospects- we all hope to find an occupation that compensates us well. If statistics are any indication, college graduates earn on an average significantly more than high school graduates. Still, a lavish salary is no guarantee that you'll love your job. A recent survey of upper management personnel at major corporations revealed that regardless of the money, a majority of them remained highly dissatisfied with their jobs. 

What I AM saying is that if one’s motivation for pursuing an education is because of "the work it will do IN YOU" rather than "what it will do for your work"--that it will expand your mind, enlarge your perspectives, and further your knowledge of yourselves and the world around you; that it will provide you with principles, values, and virtues to guide you in your actions; that it will force you to test your own limits and push you to transcend them--then you'll more than likely find an occupation you TRULY enjoy; you'll discover how your natural curiosity and hunger to learn, your broadening awareness and openness to new challenges will not only make you a much better EMPLOYEE, but MORE IMPORTANTLY, it'll make you a much more complete HUMAN BEING. Amen and amen.