5 Options For Your New Education

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What do you do with your education now that you have it – and now that it is beginning to become obsolete even as you sit here? - Choose One of Five | Andrew Scott | Figures of Speech


If you want you can also read the whole transcript, this for me is the choice I made and I didn't even know it, I can't imagine any other way of being.

And then, finally, there's choice five. It's hard to state this one. About as close as I can come to it is this: Hang loose, but stay vibrantly alive.

This one's strenuous. This one's demanding.

Choice five would demand of you that you consider today's graduation no more than a pause to catch your breath before continuing the life-long job of education. It would demand of you that you be your own unique best self. And there is no higher demand that that.

Choice five entails wide-ranging reading and deep-probing thought.

It calls for a contradictory thing - a mind that is constantly open to new facts that dictate change but at the same time is resolutely committed to what seems best at any given point of time.

It calls for human involvement, a compassionate concern for everyone on this fast-shrinking little planet of ours and for the generations to come.

It calls for the resolute rejection of all stereotypes and insists on the thoughtful examination of even the most widely held assumptions that are too easily taken for granted.

If only choice five involved only one thing or the other thought or action - it would be ever so much easier. It doesn't, though. It involves both. And as if that weren't bad enough, this choice usually brings with it a certain amount of inner ache, because this way is a lonely way.

But those who make choice five are never fully comfortable.

They are nagged at by their realisation that they could be wrong.

They're prodded by their recognition that they've still so much more to learn and even more than that to understand. They're made restless by their knowledge that no matter how much they do, there's still ever so much more left to be done.

Choice-five people have to live constantly with an acceptance of the fact that there are no simple answers in this world because there are no simple questions.

This makes life exciting for them, challenging, at least intermittently rewarding. But comfortable? No.

I would not urge choice five on any of you graduates. It asks so much of you.

Any of the other four will see you through to age 60 or 65, retirement, and a modest pension. They might easily do better than that and make you rich. In dollars, that is. Five is there, though, one of the multiple choices on the test.

If any of you in this class makes that fifth choice, I wish you'd let me know about it. You I'd like to know better.

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