Response to "Sabbaticals From Life and Death"

1. The professor writes his theory of education upon his leaving a university at which he has taught for 17 years. He is clearly worried about the status and goals of institutionalized learning and attempts to articulate the apparent failures of the current system. In the alternative, he offers his idea of the meaning of education. His idea of education is very much tied to what he seems to see as the meaning of life, and it is very different from the view of education that most people seem to hold today. For that reason, gaining an understanding of the professor's true meaning of education is difficult.

The essay can be divided into largely three sections. In the first section, roughly to page 3, the professor creates the metaphor of life as a force of energy. In the second section, roughly from pages 3 to 6, he describes education as characterized by competing forces of energy. In the third section, roughly from pages 6 to 13, the professor weaves together the lessons of education and life as the means toward the ultimate goal of human interaction.

The professor organizes his essay by first creating the metaphor of life as a force of competing energies. He then extends the metaphor to education as a competing force of potential and kinetic energy. Both life and education, therefore, operate in similar ways. But is he saying, then, that life is education? Or education is life? I think that, in a way, this is ind

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aking a connection between students as forces of potential energy and education as a force of kinetic energy with teachers initially serving as the catalyst. This extended metaphor runs throughout the essay. In the "Twilight Zone" story, the teacher has lost his balance because the constant push and pull of teaching is about to be taken away from him. He has, in effect, lost his equilibrium because he will no longer be able to give. But he regains his equilibrium when his ghostly students return to give back to him. Push and pull. But the "Twilight Zone" story also raises the issue of the future, which I guess is, after all, the very purpose of education. Preparing students for the future: "As long as a teacher has students he has a livelihood; and as long as his students become teachers he has a future." But what do livelihoods and futures have to do with education and students and life? The immediate answer is, of course, obvious: Education prepares students to earn and livelihood and secure their futures. But doesn't it, or shouldn't it, do more than that? Isn't there some inherent value to education that exceeds the mere earning of a living? The author of "Sabbaticals" answers with a resounding "yes." It is th

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