Sculpting Your Life

Many years ago, the English essayist, Joseph Addison likened education to sculpture when he wrote, “What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.”

Think for a moment about what education has meant in your own life. Your schooling has been such an important determinant in getting you where you are today. It stands to reason that the knowledge you acquire from now on will be the enabling power to get you where you want to go in the future. It all depends on whether you choose to expand your life by continuing to acquire knowledge or whether you decide to be content with the future your existing education holds for you.

But yet, educators and others tell us over and over again that much of our formal schooling— even through college—is really designed to teach us how to think—and how to learn. Emerson reinforced this idea with the comment, “The things  taught in our colleges and schools are not aneducation but the means to an education.” They all are saying, of course, that we spend most of our years in schools preparing for a lifetime of education. It seems to me that it’s a terrible waste when we don’t take advantage of all that preparation. The respected contemporary American educator, Bel Kaufman, spoke to this point with the observation, “Education is not a product . . . it is a process, a never-ending one.”
(R. Stuberg)