Quote:Every month, money flies from my checking account to the education savings accounts of my children, because I don’t want them to become hobos. This is one way I allay my fear the world will eat them up. It’s a mark of a good parent to worry over where—and whether—his child will go to college, isn’t it?

I need to confess a profoundly un-American heresy: I question what my children will get for the money. I don’t question the value of education (though we make it a panacea for deeper ills of the soul); I doubt the capacity of most educational institutions to impart much beyond what one could obtain with, as the protagonist in Good Will Hunting notes, “a dollar-fifty in late charges at the public library.”

I know there are teachers who can help a student get far more out of Dracula, say, than he might acquire on his own….

…Here’s the thing: I’ve met humble, brilliant kids with Ivy League degrees, and I’ve met clever, insufferable fools with Ivy League degrees. I’ve met thoroughgoing dunces passing time as college students, and in the same classroom, thoughtful world-changers. I know autodidacts who make their livings with their hands, who have no need of college degrees, but whose minds are more unfettered and insightful than that of many a philosophy professor. And of course I know plenty of people who make their livings with their hands and who have no interest in thinking at all.

The chief determinant of a young person’s educational success, in other words, is not the credentialing of the professoriate. It’s the discernment and self-discipline he possesses when he reaches them. Good teachers matter, to be sure. We should find them, and reward them, and send our children to them. But our children must have hearts that seek wisdom. Fools tend to draw fools; the wise tend to draw the discerning. My kids will gravitate to the teachers I have prepared them to learn from.

Which puts me in a pretty spot, now that I think about it—striving to incline their hearts toward wisdom, yet feeling every day like a fool not up to the task. It would be so much easier to keep socking away money every month, and trust someone else to figure it out. But that’s not an option, is it?