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 indeed what he is saying. For after discussing life and then education separately, in the final part of the essay the professor intertwines education as the means toward the human interaction that he seems to believe should characterize and define life.
The concept of education as a means toward fulfillment through human interaction is difficult and disturbing. We usually view education as an individual achievement that enhances our own lives and allows us...