Weekend Essay: Graduation Isn’t an Ending — Now Accepting Students of All Ages

Some of my 30-something friends dismiss as romantic prospects people who while on dates deign to ask, “What was your major?” The thinking, it seems, is that we are too far beyond our university years to trifle with such questions; that asking them somehow shows a juvenile sensibility.I wonder, though, if there is another motivating factor to their derision. Time in college is often termed the “best years of one’s life,” and it’s true that few things are more intoxicating than the young-adult belief that all is still possible and everything has yet to unfold.Of course, we are always in process. Yet despite the endless possibilities for growth that life offers every one of us, we come to be regarded as finished products once we establish ourselves and lose the glow of youth. And what place is there for unchanging, fully developed things in an ever- and fast-changing world? What claim could fully developed people make to a world when its future is said to belong to the young?In 2016, psychologist and advocate for women’s leadership, Jennifer Manuel, argued the following: In the Industrial Revolution, for the first time, an aging workforce became a problem as we had more machines that were in our workplaces. So, older folks who were a little bit slower and made a couple more mistakes than their younger counterparts were seriously in trouble, and the prevailing attitude at the time was that they deserved to be pushed to the side…. The good news is that we’re now out of the Industrial Revolution. We’re in the Knowledge Era–the era of the knowledge worker–which is great. The bad news is that we carried all of those stereotypes and assumptions about older workers with us into the 21st century, and we haven’t paused to think if they still accurately reflect our society or serve us anymore. And, clearly, if you ask any older adult, they don’t.If we’re truly living in the knowledge era, and we need to judge an individual’s utility and value without regard to age, mustn’t we first reform our approach to education and to knowledge itself? In the decade I spent as an education professional, I developed many notions about the ways in which education is advancing and damaging our society. One is the belief that we have to stop regarding graduation as some mark of finality. We can’t act as though a person’s education ever comes to an end.What might it be like if we lived in a society in which each of us remained eternally on the brink of self-discovery and the full flowering of one’s potential? What if we were legally obligated to continue our education the way we’re required to send children to school? What if we could turn to any adult in America, at any given time, and ask, “What are you studying this year?”No one who is alive is done living. Each of us, however quiet our dreams may be now that we lack a bustling campus across which to project them, has a list of things yet to be accomplished. Shouldn’t we be paying different and greater attention to all that’s still growing in our midst? Wouldn’t that make our society a more interesting and interconnected one?The comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a bit in which he says, “Wait up is a big kid thing…. Everything with kids is up. Wait up, hold up, shut up. Mom, I’ll clean up, just let me stay up…. With parents, everything is down. Would you calm down, slow down, come down here, sit down and put that down.”What if, for people of all ages, the orientation were skyward? What if, even as responsible adults kept their eyes on the ground, their hearts and minds were upward-facing, still reflecting the boundless perspective of the young? What if they were encouraged to be idealistic and curious, even reckless?One of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received was my acceptance to a post-college leadership training fellowship. I felt reborn when this fellowship returned me to the position of learner after enduring the inevitable contraction of life as I moved off campus and narrowed to a singular focus on my job. Don’t we all deserve to be continually nourished? Wouldn’t the world benefit if everyone in it were regarded as worthy of ongoing investment and society’s interest? Wouldn’t we all be better educated if we were granted a greater diversity of colleagues in our learning? What a fascinating world that would be.

Weekend Essay: Graduation Isn’t an Ending — Now Accepting Students of All Ages

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