At this time of year the paper is filled with notices of people graduating from various institutions of what we are pleased to call higher learning. Unfortunately, we too often misunderstand what graduation is. In Latin it has to do with proceeding upward to a next step. In classical times learning was considered a life-long process and graduation from one school to another merely meant progressing on that constant ascent that we should make toward greater and greater knowledge.

We have pretty much lost that idea in contemporary times. College graduates seem to think that their next step is to a six-figure salary, which in the present economic depression is surely a forlorn hope for most. Sad to say there are still a large number of people who consider themselves adequately educated when they finish high school and thus they deprive themselves of the opportunity, while they are young and learn more easily, to expand their knowledge of life and work.

Not so long ago in our national history, teachers understood that their function was to teach us how to educate ourselves so that all through our lives, through our reading, through our employment, through our connections with the Church and with society in general, we keep learning more and more about ourselves and the world God created for us to live in. It would not be a bad idea for us to go back to that idea and see how we are carrying it out.

Teachers should particularly review what their idea of education means. The word itself comes from the Latin word meaning to “lead out, to deduce.” A good teacher tries to get the pupil to use his or her reason to arrive at reasonable conclusions about the things they study. When people disdain schools and schooling, it is almost always because of something missing in the programs of education to which they were subjected.

So, in this graduation time let us pray for the graduates that they enjoy success commensurate with their efforts in school. Let us pray for their teachers who have rightly instructed them in the disciplines they were set to learn. Let us pray for the parents of graduates who have paid huge sums of tax money, and perhaps huge private tuitions as well, to secure adequate education for their children at great personal sacrifice. And, let us pray to God in gratitude that we live in a free country where we can still choose for our young people the education we would have them have.