Examiner column for June 8.
We know that, on average, a college degree adds more than $20,000 per year to earning potential, and that improved health and longevity are also associated with the degree. But if I had to capture the essence of what I learned in college, I could do it in five pages—written by E.B. White.
“Once More To The Lake, “an essay White wrote in 1941, encapsulates everything I know. In it, he recounts a return to his childhood vacation spot with his son as he relives his own experience through the next generation.
I think of it each year when I attend the Advanced Placement Literature and Composition reading to help score the hundreds of thousands of essay tests taken by high school students hoping for college credit. The AP reading may not be a childhood vacation spot, but it is the place I return to year after year. It is where White’s revelations about the passage of time have become my own.
When I return, I feel (as White did) that all is the same: the scoring guidelines which are deliberately consistent from year to year, the thousands of 17 and 18 year-old minds who pen responses to questions they understand in widely divergent ways, the tables around which the teachers sit as they grade—occasionally interrupting the silence by sharing a trenchant insight.
Yet everything is different: I am older, and have one more year of experience at this task to draw on. I may not have my son with me, as White did, but I see teachers whom I’ve mentored who are now in leadership positions—in turn guiding new readers to an understanding of the process.
I am torn between the illusion that all is the same, and the recognition that everything is different, and that pull is what makes “Once More To The Lake” much more than a college assignment. White’s wisdom in encapsulating a universal truth in an informal narrative about his summer trip has taken me decades to internalize—but that’s the ultimate benefit of reading and education. At some point, students (and we are all perennial students) realize they have glimpsed the secrets of the universe.
Knowing that with the passage of time, everything changes—even those things that seem to be the same—may not appear to be a profound revelation, but I’ve learned that sometimes the most elusive nuggets of wisdom are those observations that seem most obvious. White’s essay restates the Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ theory that nothing is permanent except change, an insight that becomes more true with the passage of time.
No doubt many of you have had glimpses into an essential truth that can be represented by something you read or saw or wrote in college. Was it an assignment, a book, a poem, an activity, a documentary?
If you can represent your education in a single work, email me a paragraph about what it is and what it means, and I will include some of your insights in an upcoming column. We talk so much about how education changes the bottom line in our lives that we often forget how it changes the top and middle lines, too.
Comments