Having recently returned from my two week fellowship in New York, I would like to share some of my lingering thoughts. Most of these have to do with words attributed to Lucy Sprague Mitchell, the founder of Bank Street College, a place that has had a salient influence on my development and beliefs as an educator. The other concerns the Rodin sculpture, Man Thinking, which is situated on the Columbia University campus, where I had my classes.

Mitchell’s words ¨The good life is the learning life ¨ gets at what we, in educational jargon, call ´life long learning.´ Not one for jargon or platitudes, the idea of the good life being equated to the learning life, resonates in profound ways for me. It reinforces the idea of an educated person as a perpetually growing person. This sense of life as a constant pursuit of knowledge and inquiry, comes alive in the Rodin statue. For reasons that I only instinctually know, I was drawn to it like an energy field, nearly every day I was on campus. On bitterly cold days with the wind rising off of the Hudson River, to snow swept mornings when I could barely feel my face, I had to pass in front of Man Thinking and admire it. It sits, interestingly enough, in front of the philosophy building and from what I am told; John Dewey (another one of my intellectual ancestors) would gaze at it from his office. What is striking about the sculpture is the poetics of the body, bent over in thought, every sinew and muscle tense and alert. It is the embodiment of a human in dialogue with themselves: pondering, questioning, doubting, wondering, and marveling. It is man thinking in the most engaged and vital ways one can: mindful and reflective. Every time I passed by it I kept hearing the words of Lucy Sprague Mitchell imploring me “the good life is the learning life.” And why not? To construct a life that is driven by a kind of intellectual and spiritual appetite to absorb all the details and wonders of what it is to be fully human. Life long learning? I prefer to think of it as life long yearning: to grow and to experience, to dream and to vision, to make life as rich and complex as possible.

Is this not the core of what we want for our children: a life of continuous seeking and learning, which comes not from ease or entitlement, but emotional and intellectual effort and struggle?

The learning life is not a quiet life. It is cosmopolitan and not suburban. It is multicultural and not monolingual. The learning life is the ethical life, the daring life, the committed life, a living that contains hope and care and curiosity. It is a way of conducting ones life with humility and joy. It is like a Woody Guthrie ballad, finding the honorable and noble in all living things. It is what I hope every graduate of BFIS leaves here with—an insatiable desire to seek knowledge as a way of making life worth living.