The Freedom of Real Education

     "If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and who and what is really important, if you want to operate on your default setting, then you like me probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable.
     But if you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation, as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars. Love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
     Not that mystical oneness is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of real education.                                       David Foster Wallace

      Wallace's entire 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Speech (below) is WELL worth 22 minutes of your time.