"I share with them that they were children longer than they will be teens, and that what they do for these brief six years can dictate what happens for the next 60 years of their lives,"

No, the point of an education is that a person can adopt skills to adapt to an ever-changing environment.

One man's life cannot be dictated in six years. One's capacity to learn can still grow, no matter what challenges an individual may face.

The poverty of modern eduction is this mad-cap urgency, that without intense intervention from the state, a young person cannot succeed. Yet in spite of all the monies and attention paid to public schooling, young people enter the world unprepared for the opportunities and the challenges that await them.

To be educated is to be enlightened, and to be enlightened is a spiritual matter which cannot be imparted through the mind. The creative spirit that moves many to succeed in life tends to be stifled unsummarily in one's developing years. Rather than emphasizing the facts that one can learn in twelve years, how far have we come in expanding a young person's capacity to embrace a world which scares many? How have we informed the values of young people, when so many of them feel entitled to take without working, to hurt others without considering the consequences to themselves and to loved ones?

These core principles cannot be expressed or expounded in short classes five days a week. Living through hard times with hard determination on the basis of simple certainties will ensure that any person, no matter when they began to learn, can still succeed.

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