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If you leave school satisfied with your education, it has failed you, and you have failed it. There are two views of education -- that it prepares you for your role in life, and that it prepares you for life. One views learning as limitation, the other as overcoming limitations.

Where is the transcendance in our schools? Where do we touch the ineffable? Why, so often, does it seem that the stuff that's really important is what we cover despite our curricula?

As educators we justify our existence by the usefulness of the school to -- let's be honest -- the larger economy. We mold students into better, fitter, and above all spendthriftier workers in a post-industrial world. As citizenship is replaced by consumership, education receds into training and teachers become technicians. We need to stand, to be advocates for our students, for their futures, for their minds, perhaps even for their souls. Someone has to help them see that there is more to the world than the material, or the materialistic.

Look up from the trough!