And somehow I scraped a high enough score on the ACT to be admitted
to Brigham Young University. I studied for ten years. I sought out
as many ideas and perspectives as I could find and I used that body
of knowledge to try to construct my own mind.
This pursuit would take me to some of the most respected
universities in the world - to Cambridge, to Harvard. What I would
come to understand from this journey is that education is not the
same thing as a school. A school is merely the institution through
which an education is offered.
An education is something you take for yourself. It's a process of
becoming. That is the power of it, and that is the danger of it. For
some, the word "educated" has come to mean
institutionalized.
But it doesn't have to mean that. An education is the remaking of a
person. You can submit to that remaking passively. Or you can take
an active part. To choose the second is to remake yourself. To
choose the first, is to be made by others.
** If someone
becomes institutionalized, they gradually become less able to think
and act independently, because of having lived for a long time under
the rules of an institution. **
We need to avoid long-stay patients in
the hospital becoming institutionalized.
