The Beyond in Education

The world is, after all, beyond college,

Beyond school.

Scholarship is in the service of the world beyond,

(Not the misleadingly-named "real-world," but the sordid, anarchic world of the everyday, full of bills, full of worries, also of memories, letters, love, confusion, trash bags, poetry, amnesia, skin problems, babies, old people, calendars, quarrels, peace, internal monologues, solitude, misunderstanding, pride, other people's pride, hazing, paranoia, gluttony, hunger, helplessness, charitable feelings, lots of toothpaste, trees, breathlessness, fatigue, congee, telephone calls, news, growth, thoughts, food, toilet breaks, both real and unreal)

And education in schools is a skylight to heaven;

School is not the heaven itself.

Go out, go deep -

School is your home, your resting place,

Your inn: a bed and a meal, on your way to a new place,

To difference, to storms, to the stars.

The guiding light is always the what? The sky ~

Dig into the sky.

*So, the argument should not be about whether education ought to prepare students for the world out there, which incidentally includes the worlds inside. Of course it ought to. The real debate should focus instead on what that preparation means, not just for the students, but for parents, teachers, and all others. For example, someone might say studying art history doesn't prepare students for the world beyond. A proponent of art history may respond by arguing that education isn't all about usefulness. But that's not the point. Art history is useful! For life! Don't you know how colors and shapes can fire up your life, cheer you up? And through art history, we learn that our vision isn't something that's completely naturally given. How liberating such knowledge can be! So yes, it's just that there are lots of different kinds of usefulness. The question isn't about utilitarianism versus non. You know, utilities aren't just about electricity, gas, and water. Or food. They're also about strength, tolerance, understanding. And versions of truth. To put it another way, usefulness isn't just about usefulness. It's about importance. What's important to you? To us? Sometimes, we are tempted to prioritize, assigning ranks by order of importance. But why bother? Why not concentrate on enlarging our ark, so that cut-off lists are no longer relevant? When we can't hold anymore, let's acknowledge our limit head-on, instead of cutting things off and pretending as if they never existed. Let's acknowledge our narrow bandwidth, if it is really narrow, and fully, verily confront its narrowness.