School Ends, Education is Lifelong

Father Michael Oleksa

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(Published: June 2, 2002)

All over the world, children are completing another year of schooling this month. Millions of graduating seniors are marching down thousands of aisles to the same martial music the Western world has played for 200 years. And millions more parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles are looking proudly on as their children move another step toward adulthood -- and can finally get a paying job.

About five millennia ago, when writing systems were invented and the first libraries and schools were founded, there must have been the equivalent of today's commencement exercises, probably without mortarboards. One might assume that before the invention of the alphabet and the grade book, little education existed. In the sense that kids did not sit in classrooms or take written exams or earn grades, that's certainly true. But education is older than schooling, and it is dangerous, I think, to confuse the two.

Education is whatever a person learns that proves to be useful, meaningful, relevant to life. Schooling is what we do in schools. And let's be honest: Not everything we do in school is useful, meaningful or relevant to everyone. In fact, having gone to school for almost half my years, I can think back on entire semesters of college material that ultimately turned out to be useless, meaningless and irrelevant. And we paid lots of money for those courses.

Nevertheless, in the world today, being educated in this formal sense -- passing tests, writing papers, earning credits and becoming a certified professional in a specialized field -- is an economic as well as social and political necessity. An illiterate person cannot participate fully in the global society that has evolved on this planet in the past 30 years.

But a child also must learn to be a human being. Research conducted over several decades, involving hundreds of thousands of students around the world, indicates that resilient kids, who can bounce back from setbacks and resist the temptations of alcohol, drugs and risky sexual activity, have had at least five caring adults in their lives.

They have been loved and encouraged by family, friends, neighbors, pastors and teachers. They learn in safe, caring environments, in which high standards of ethical as well as academic performance are the rule. They are active in cultural and/or musical groups, care for others, keep their word. They behave like human beings.

The Search Institute of Minneapolis names these positive protective factors in a child's life "Assets." The name may be new, but the concept goes back to the time before education came from a book and progress could be measured by a test.

After I spent an evening explaining the Assets framework in an Alaska Native community, an elder rose from amid the assembly and announced, "The wisdom of the elders has withstood the research test of time." That's one of my favorite quotations from the wonderful book "Helping Kids Succeed -- Alaska Style," published by the Alaska Association of School Boards. Every student and parent should read it and think about its message. The back cover features a drawing of a child holding an elder's hand with another wonderful

quote: "Every adult needs a child to guide. That's how adults learn."

Where in modern society do we teach human values to youths? When can we say with some confidence that we have educated a youth to be a compassionate, caring, honest and self-regulating adult?

We hope most of those millions receiving degrees and diplomas are aware of the need to grow in their humanity, for it is a course from which we never graduate. Becoming fully human is a never-ending, eternal process, and only the saints and sages of the past can guide us toward that goal. And even they will have little impact on us if we don't have a loving, caring elder, parent, aunt, uncle, grandparent or godparent who has supported and encouraged us.

How many kids would name you as one of the significant five adults in their life? Assets are a framework each of us must build deliberately if we want our children to be productive citizens in the modern global society and also to know what it means to be a "real" person and seek someday to become one. Some of the kids who dropped or flunked out had few Assets in their lives -- fewer than five caring adults to offer encouragement and support and serve as appropriate role models. We all have an impact on youths. Everyone, after all, is some kind of role model. Some are just more positive than others.

Graduates, now that you have completed a milestone in your schooling, be sure to spend extra time with older friends and relatives. We all want you to become a complete human being and are eager to help you achieve that goal any way we can. If you are done with classroom learning, seek out grandparents and with them continue your education for the rest of your life. Elders are our greatest Assets, not just smiling down upon graduates at commencement but forever, as long as we are blessed to be with them. That's where education begins, and it never ends.

The Rev. Michael Oleksa is dean of St. Innocent Orthodox Cathedral, 6724 E. Fourth Ave. He can be reached at frm31647 at hotmail.com.

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