Dear Student,
This course is called The Responsibility of Education. What education means to you is something we’ll discuss throughout, but I think, at the most basic level, education means growth. The course is about taking responsibility for your growth and your influence on the growth of others.
When you’re a child, it’s fitting that adults, who know better than you, direct your growth. When you enter adolescence you should start asking yourself (with the support of adults): How do I want to grow? What directions of growth are most authentic to me? What do I want to be able to do, say, think, and create? What problems do I want to solve? How do I want to make the world better?
Answering these questions for yourself gives you personal, meaningful learning goals. And pursuing these goals fundamentally changes the way you learn.
This learning is often deeper and more lasting. It exposes you to the more attractive, intrinsic rewards of learning, making you more likely to learn throughout your life. The voluntary nature of this learning gives expression to an emerging sense of self that demands clarity, agency, and self-determined purpose. The more you work toward these goals, the more competent and substantial that self becomes.
As an adult, no one is going to make sure you keep growing. And no one is going to make sure your influence on the growth of others is positive. If you want to teach others well and shape environments that promote human well-being, you must claim a certain degree of responsibility for yourself: your character, your values, your speech, etc. Learning to appreciate and improve your inevitable impact on the world around you is one of the most important tasks you can take on.
Few decisions are more significant than choosing to honor your growth and your influence on the growth of others. Doing so will change the way you value your time, the way you relate to others and the larger world. If you want it to this course can be a milestone in your life. A point in time when you choose to expect more from yourself, when you raise your standards of maturity and intellectual ability. You can choose to make the space of these tutoring sessions special—somewhere you can be a different kind of student, where you can aspire to and accomplish more than you thought you could.
This course would ask a lot of you—not in terms of the quantity of work involved (that will be up to you), but in terms of the quality of your involvement. The course represents the uncommon expectations I have for you, and my faith in your ability to meet them. But more important than what others would ask of you, is what you will ask of yourself: Given the nature of the task before you—of caring for and cultivating the person that is you, who has an unavoidable impact on the world, and the potential to do great good—what kind of person will you be? What will you aim for? How will your aims effect others?
How will you choose to grow? And for what purposes?
These are the central questions we’ll address together. It’s my aim to help you appreciate and fulfill your responsibility to learn and teach to the best of your ability. I want to help you develop the skills, insight, and motivation to choose the best education for yourself (and eventually those under your care) and to pursue it continually.
Naturally, questions concerning your growth are of interest to your parents. An essential part of this course is their inclusion, and both of your combined efforts to develop relationships and a home environment that further your learning goals (which you’ve discussed together). It will benefit you greatly to involve your parents in your autonomous education. They can be an invaluable source of caring guidance, wisdom, and knowledge of you.
Though I’ll take measures to inform your parents of our work together, I want you to be the main conduit through which this information is shared. One of the goals of this course (one that I encourage you to adopt personally) is to support the intellectual life of your family—to prompt meaningful, enlightening conversation that brings you together. And, after all, if what you’re studying isn’t something you’re eager to talk about, then you’re probably studying the wrong thing.
There are no grades or scores that will represent (or oversimplify) the effectiveness of this course. To evaluate it, you and your parents must discuss the goals you’ve chosen and whether enough progress is being made toward them. Perhaps most importantly, you must evaluate your own efforts. Are you actively participating, or are you expecting change to come from outside? This course (and all mature education, for that matter) isn’t like a restaurant where you pay for food and simply consume it (willingly or not). It’s more like a gym membership with a personal trainer, where achieving your goals requires your consistent, voluntary effort. In such a gym, you pay for access to certain resources; how much value you get from them is (for the most part) up to you.
The first step is making the choice to take the course for reasons that are your own (not because someone else wants you to). No one is forcing you to take it; there are no artificial consequences if you don’t. But consider the natural consequences of a life without educational responsibility—without the pursuit of autonomous, lifelong growth. And consider the blessings of a life with this responsibility—the benefits to yourself and all those you would affect.
Choosing this course starts with declaring a personal value—“I value my development as a person, and I sense (at least in an initial way) my need to be responsible for it. I value the effect my learning and teaching has on the world around me, and I want to improve it.”
Among the educational goals you may choose, this one is foundational: I want to grow in meaningful, authentic, exemplary ways that improve my life and the lives of others.
If this purpose resonates with you—if you’re willing to claim and uphold this value—then I think you have much to gain from this course, and the world has much to gain from your embrace of the responsibility of education.