A friend of mine recently requested some feedback for a 360-degree review with people he knows and trusts professionally and personally.

When I said that was a rare and brave act, he said he couldn’t imagine another way to keep growing.

He’s on to something important — but how many of us even think to do something like this? And how many actually follow through?

Today concludes a month-long series on this question.

And while it’s hard for me to improve on Seth Godin’s original answer — to lead and to solve interesting problems — I’d like to add a more personal dimension to it.

I think school is for learning who and how we want to be: what postures we’ll adopt, what work we’ll do, and how we’re going to approach work and life as effectively as we can.

In my experience with Seth’s work over the past year and half, I have learned more than I ever imagined about “turning pro” — that is, how to show up in the world as a professional, as an artist, and as a sworn agent of making things better.

But I can’t ignore the fact that this follows the three most important messages of my classically-influenced undergraduate education. The first was that everyone has an interior life, and it matters. The second was that the purpose and process of education is coming to know what is. And the third was that living itself is an art worthy of study and practice.

After all, if we’re going to lead, to solve interesting problems, and to make things better, it’s essential that we understand ourselves, others, and the world well enough to act both ethically and effectively.

Turning pro with no capacity for discernment can be dangerous, just as being merely efficient — doing the wrong things well — can cause more harm than good.

The tension that schools must dance with, then, is between giving people the tools to reflect accurately upon themselves and what is — and also giving them the confidence, competence, and charge to stand up, lead, and make things better. That ought to rule out both hiding in an endless search for self-perfection as well as heedless acting in an attempt to avoid encountering oneself or the world.

The devil, of course, is in the details of application. But just imagine what might happen if we asked of each class, each person, and each school, “How is this helping me understand who I am?” and “How is this helping me learn how to lead?”

If we start from the premise that the modern economy demands lifelong learning, what might that mean for the future of school?

The old model is premised on the idea that people can learn what they need to know in a more or less solid block from the age of five up to the age of 16, or 18, or 22, or 30.

But let’s say you complete college or grad school now, aged 22 or 28. You’ll probably work for 50 years — through five recessions, the advent of self-driving cars, AI we can’t even imagine yet, and who knows what else.

I bought my first smartphone during my senior spring: late to the party, yet still not even 10 years ago.

Henry Kissinger once said that a person in a policymaking role doesn’t learn anything new on the job; he’s only spending down the knowledge he brought into it.

Kissinger was able to take boxes of books to the beach in Mexico between jobs, and of course that was a luxury. These days, that kind of in-and-out, action-reflection cycle is no longer a luxury but a necessity.

All of which begs the question: how might we redesign school so that it was often, actionable, and affordable, rather than occasional, theoretical, and astronomically expensive?

We’ve known for a long time that standardized tests don’t sort for actual smarts.

They might sort for seriousness (the only semi-defensible argument left in their favor), but they mostly sort for privilege and access.

There has to be a better way, and I suspect it might be a discussion community.

Imagine what might happen if colleges (and employers?) started talking with high schoolers, and grad schools started talking with college grads.

If schools and students were able to spend a couple of years getting to know each other, they might have a much better idea of all the things standardized tests are supposed to indicate — plus a lot more relevant information about soft skills and financial planning, for example.

Acing the test but failing student loans or the transition to the workforce doesn’t serve either the student or the school.

One of the challenges with being in school is that it’s easy to lose track of what’s happening in the world beyond.

Knowing the history, theory, and context is important — but you’ll be expected to catch up with, stay abreast of, and manage the state of the art after you graduate.

It’s a little like buying a car: if you only do that once or twice a decade, you miss a lot of evolution. By the time you’ve learned to work the CD player, they’re not installing them anymore.

Reading the news can help, but simply reading isn’t enough. It’s worth finding an opportunity to see how the new technology actually works on the road from time to time.

When I was living and teaching out West, I noticed that both parents’ and teachers’ first response to a child facing a challenge was, “Solve your problem.”

I’ve always appreciated that phrase, and the pedagogical philosophy it embodies. Learning to sit with tension is an essential part of the learning process: after all, we go from not-knowing to knowing, and most of us find not-knowing uncomfortable.

Kids who learn that they can always find an adult to relieve tension will keep looking for that shortcut. Kids who learn to solve their problems will learn that they can work through tension and find solutions on their own.

If it’s hard to stand the sight of a seven-year-old who can’t seem to get a handle on a problem, consider how it might look at age 27.

George Orwell didn’t like the word feedback.

Like it or not, the word has firmly entered the lexicon — and thank goodness.

Whatever you call it, feedback is one of the crucial components of learning. We need to know what worked, what didn’t, and how we might improve. Even bad feedback can be useful, and good feedback, well delivered, is a real gift.

A few barely-legible comments on a term paper are rarely useful feedback. (If a 30-page paper is too long to critique effectively, why is it 30 pages? Who does that serve?)

But even the best-delivered feedback must also be received openly and reflected upon honestly if it’s going to work.

Grades aren’t effective feedback, especially if they’re inflated. Getting a grade you can live with is one thing. Asking for good, growthful feedback is quite another.

We might be stuck with the word, but we can at least get better about the process.

In order to learn, students need to feel seen, feel safe, and feel stretched.

Unseen, they won’t engage. The lecture will just wash over them.

Unsafe, they’ll hold back — testing the water each time rather than learning to swim.

Unstretched, they’ll lose interest. They will do what’s required and no more.

Providing and balancing those three feelings is the art of teaching.

A friend recently described a school-mandated bystander intervention training she’d participated in.

From the sound of it, the school has decided to take on the consequences and liability of poor socialization — and to respond by teaching students to police each other.

Let’s face it: by the time some twenty- or thirty-somethings end up in an uncomfortable situation on or off campus, all sorts of systemic factors are in play. People have different head starts in life — or at the keg in the basement.

Mandating that student leaders receive training in bystander intervention is pretty unobjectionable on its face. Hazing, bullying, and harassment will always start from time to time; it’s worth stopping them when they crop up, and with as much skill and tact as possible.

But this way of framing the problem is pretty unhealthy on the whole. How did all of this become schools’ responsibility? How can they expect students to handle it? And when safety is mandated and mandatory, educated and enforced as a matter of authority rather than citizenship, how will that shape the culture over the long term?

“Ideas that spread, win,” as Seth Godin has been saying for years.

We tend to think about that in terms of outbound — about getting our own ideas to spread and win.

But what about the ideas we allow in? Those ideas spread within our consciousness, and they reshape how we think and view the world.

The world is awash in ideas, all competing for our attention. Your favorite book. Fox News. An ocean of podcasts.

There’s a whole lot of marketing we can’t avoid in this world — billboards, direct mail, traditional advertisements.

But we still get to choose where, when, and on whom we spend some of our attention, and it’s worth being as mindful as possible about that.

Plenty of people will happily fill your head with nonsense if you let them.

Don’t help them win the battle for your attention.