A place we carry inside ourselves

The Familiar Place - By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
From the NY Times, June 3rd, Editorial Notebook

The trick, of course — and it is a hard one to master — is to think of home not as a place we go to or come from, not as something inherent in the world itself, but as a place we carry inside ourselves, a place where we welcome the unfamiliar because we know that as time passes it will become the very bedrock of our being.

This struck a chord with me and got me thinking.

Stream 1:
I began life living with my parents. Two years of boarding school followed, then five of College. A couple of jobs. Graduate School. More jobs. And along the way kids and a house. Fairly typical - with the sense of home morphing along the way until it finally comes to rest on the little piece of land we now call home.

I don't sleep well when I am not at home. And I still remember when I first noticed that I had stopped sleeping well in my parents' house, needing to return to my dorm room for a good night's sleep. (Something I like asking people is where they dream, especially if they have moved city in the last few years.)

Stream 2:
I enjoyed grad school immensely, but I faulted my education on two counts. First, it did not spend much time preparing me for a life in academia. (A bit like a school covering the core curriculum, but not preparing its students to be future citizens in their community.) The other is that, even at that rarefied level of a PhD, so little attention was paid to the idea of owning ones own education. I believe that, at all levels, the education system does not pay enough attention to preparing people for independence as learners (despite the popularity of that phrase life-long learners.)

Intersection of these two streams:

The trick, of course, is to think of school not as a place we go to or come from, not as something inherent in the world itself, but as a place we carry inside ourselves, a place where we welcome the unfamiliar because we know that as time passes what we learn there will become the very bedrock of our being.

That to me is the essence of being a life-long learner. And the levels of independence and rootedness closely parallel those of the various spaces we call home. But just as we eventually create our own space as adults (to be inhabited for long chunks of time), so too we must create our own school (our learning home).

The formal education system needs to make it explicit to its students that this is something it seeks to prepare them for.

[edited the modified quote to include ashley's suggestion.]