Education or Inspiration?

If you have to choose between edu­ca­tion or inspi­ra­tion, choose inspi­ra­tion. Edu­ca­tion can net you a com­fort­able lifestyle, but inspi­ra­tion can take you to the stars. If you can get the two work­ing together, you can have your cake and eat it too. As an edu­ca­tor, I am giv­ing more and more atten­tion to inspi­ra­tion and less to merely slog­ging along through text­books. An inspired stu­dent will pur­sue the sub­ject for a life­time; a con­form­ing stu­dent will merely pass the course.

We are all aware of the dis­mal sta­tis­tics con­cern­ing grad­u­a­tion num­bers. Many school dis­tricts strug­gle to grad­u­ate half of those that begin the pur­suit. Often an entire school’s cur­ricu­lum is reworked only to dis­cover the same results. The prob­lem is not so much in the mate­r­ial as it is in the loss of heart. Uni­ver­sity deans told me three decades ago that after the protest­ing stu­dents left the con­form­ing stu­dents arrived. They saw that older sib­lings march­ing in the streets got them nowhere, so they became the hard work­ing urban pro­fes­sion­als of the last cou­ple of decades. How­ever, their chil­dren are often the most lost of all. They do not even have the heart to con­form — much less achieve.

Most of us over the age of fifty have watched the decline. Scholas­tic apti­tude has edged ever down­ward since the mid­dle of the last cen­tury. That indi­cates some­thing deeper than a loss of moti­va­tion or dis­ci­pline, it points to a cul­ture pro­gres­sively los­ing its way. Dreams have degen­er­ated into bat­tles over imag­ined rights.

Edu­ca­tion is impor­tant, but it is no sub­sti­tute for inspi­ra­tion. We find our inspi­ra­tion in the teach­ers them­selves. It was not the twenty-five years of col­lege that made the dif­fer­ence for me as much as it was the men­tors and great books I found along the way.

Inspi­ra­tion is a mat­ter of the whole heart; edu­ca­tion is more a mat­ter of every­day will. You need both, but it is inspi­ra­tion that lights the fires that never go out.