A PERSONAL VISION OF COURAGE IN EDUCATION

I have all my life been dedicated to education as a field. I see

education as an idea instilled in a place enriched with thought
ingredients in utterly unimaginably varied possibilities. The one
required ingredient for learning is courage. I say “courage” is essential
because of what I am going to say next.

Seeking impossible goals requires courage. Personally, the more

impossible a particular goal is, the more committed I become to
achieving it.

I also go further and say that in order to accomplish something which

is worthwhile enough to strive for with rewards that last forever, it
must meet the criteria of that which would otherwise not attempted,
be and remain, “impossible.”

Seeking an elusive goal requires more than courage and courage may
take many shapes, but certainly, human development indicates that
the more challenging a task is in completion, the more purposeful,
engrossing, and fulfilling it is.

I inherited a taste for seeking seemingly impossible goals, step by

step, from my parents. My father, grandson of a farming family from
Ohio whose father, a doctor, was the first of his family to emerge into
the professional class, had always demonstrated to me the value of
reading and of writing.

My mother, once a child rancher who picked cotton and other crops,
and whose own father was resettled, and she migrated from their first
home to their second home just across the border in Chihuahua before
immigrating to New Mexico.

My mother and father were an unusual and a racially-mixed couple,

but they shared values such as family unity, honor, service, and
enterprise, allowed them to raise a family of seven children and to see
all of them carry out the family legacies of commitment, excellence,
and humanistic outreach through athletics, business, education,
health, and human services as well as arts, theatre, and literature.

My family consisted of my laboratory and seeding ground for my

professional formation. We understood as immigrants that our
everyday existence was one requiring discipline, long-term planning,
competitive values, and humanistic dedication. These were not simply
intoned as expectations, but they were demanded with intensity and
with consistency. Much of this talent for self-enrichment was extolled
by our community, the Beaumont-Banning Pass Area where my
parents decided to settle. It was the 1970’s, and school seemed to me
a form of stability, from the changes of residence and the goodbyes we
often exchanged with our loved ones who resided out of the country or
in the Midwest.

The most important education is the one I received in the world

encompassing my family, my community, and myself, as we enter,
together and as one, the future, emboldened with the ideas, skills, and
methods learned in educational institutions which value the ability,
commitment, and ingenuity embodied in the pioneering of an
education as a personal quest and form of development of skills,
talents, and abilities waiting to be realized.