I have dedicated my career to education and believe wholeheartedly in its worth. I know that education provides many valuable lessons and transforms student lives in ways few other experiences can.
Much of education is measured by the compilation of credits. Students take classes, earn credits, and move forward to the next grade. Obtain 128 of the right credits in college and you graduate. Mission accomplished — yeah! If you never pick up a book again, you still have achieved your goal.
What education doesn’t do well is teach students the concept of negative progress. Most things in life are not like credit accumulation, where once goals are earned they remain yours. Instead, life is more like weight loss or savings — you can continue on a steady path and achieve your goal, but if you don’t continue the behavior that got you there, you will lose all the results that you have obtained. You can’t methodically exercise and eat right; achieve a weight loss goal and then celebrate being “done” and expect the results to stay with you as a diploma does.
It is a valuable life lesson to learn that reverse can happen, and understand how to prepare for it; to know that success is tenuous and that behavior needs to be sustained to preserve it. Education would do well to celebrate the journey more than the destination and to help its students master the lesson of persistent, lifelong effort rather than focus on the episodic endings.
Originally published in modified form on September 12, 2012
