The best education is not in the halls of a university

We put a lot of value on education, especially in the United States.
I know when I graduated high school it was almost a given that I go to college. A lot of my high school classmates did not go to an advanced school of knowledge, either getting married, taking jobs or just bumming around for awhile.
We kid one another at class reunions that most of the people we graduated with were in prison, but that was not the case. Well, at least, not in one instance.
A fellow classmate burned our high school down to the ground my junior year and we were without our beloved school. We were bussed to a high school in Birmingham for a year-and-a-half while the school was rebuilt. Ours was the first graduating class in the new school auditorium.
We helped build the school back for those coming after us by going out and collecting money from people in other communities. It was a lesson for life for most of us.
I wouldn’t trade places with anyone, however, for the education received at the institutions I attended. Only later in life did I feel a need for more education. This time it was on my terms and in a field which was self-serving at the same time.
What I learned from alternative schooling was about life, God, wisdom, compassion, love, death, birth, etc. The fact that titles came with this type of learning is insignificant to me. It was the process of learning something more valuable than a university degree in journalism, business, social services or the medical field. It was more of an education in Earth Learning.
Life is the process of learning, and the wisdom we acquire throughout our lives is the reward of existence.
As we journey the winding roads that lead from birth to death, experience is our patient teacher. We exist, bound to human bodies as we are, to evolve, enrolled by the universe in Earth School, an informal and individualized academy of living, being, and changing. Life’s lessons can take many forms and present us with many challenges.
There are scores of mundane lessons that help us learn to navigate with grace, poise, and tolerance in this world. And there are those once-in-a-lifetime lessons that touch us so deeply that they change the course of our lives. The latter can be heartrending, and we may wander through life as unwilling students for a time. But the quality of our lives is based almost entirely on what we derive from our experiences.
Earth School provides us with an education of the heart and the soul, as well as the intellect. The scope of our instruction is dependent on our ability and readiness to accept the lesson laid out before us in the circumstances we face.
When we find ourselves blindsided by life, we are free to choose to close our minds or to view the inbuilt lesson in a narrow-minded way.
The notion that existence is a never-ending lesson can be dismaying at times. The courses we undertake in Earth School can be painful as well as pleasurable, and as taxing as they are eventually rewarding. However, in every situation, relationship, or encounter, a range of lessons can be unearthed.
When we choose to consciously take advantage of each of the lessons we are confronted with, we gradually discover that our previous ideas about love, compassion, resilience, grief, fear, trust, and generosity could have been half-formed.
Ultimately, when we acknowledge that growth is an integral part of life and that attending Earth School is the responsibility of every individual, the concept of "life as lesson" no longer chafes. We can openly and joyfully look for the blessing buried in the difficulties we face without feeling that we are trapped in a roller-coaster ride of forced learning. Though we cannot always know when we are experiencing a life lesson, the wisdom we accrue will bless us with the keenest hindsight.
We are all almost always in the process of learning something new, developing an underused ability or talent, or toning down an overused one. Some of us are involved in learning how to speak up for ourselves, while others are learning how to be more considerate. In the process of becoming, we are always developing and fine tuning one or the other of our many qualities, and it is a natural part of this process that things tend to get out of balance. This may be upsetting to us, or the people around us, but we can trust that it’s a normal part of the work of self-development.
For example, we may go through a phase of needing to learn how to say no, as part of learning to set boundaries and take care of ourselves. During this time, we might say no to just about everything, as a way of practicing and exploring this ability.
Like a child who learns a new word, we want to try out this new avenue of expression and empowerment as much as we can because it is new and exciting for us and we want to explore it fully. In this way, we are mastering a new skill, and eventually, as we integrate it into our overall identity, it will resume its position as one part of our balanced life.
In this process, we are overcompensating for a quality that was suppressed in our life, and the swinging of the pendulum from under-use to overuse serves to bring that quality into balance.
Understanding what’s happening is a useful tool that helps us to be patient with the process. In the end, the pendulum settles comfortably in the center, restoring balance inside and out.

John W. Cargile, Msc.D, D.D. is a licensed pastoral psychology counselor. He is a member of the National Education Association and Alabama Education Association. He is the author of a new novel, The Cry of the Cuckoos. www.thecryofthecuckoos.com You can contact him at jwcargile@charter,net. All conversations are confidential.