2001 was an interesting time to bet on Americans’ fear.

The country was still basking in the post-Cold War afterglow. The ghost of Vietnam had been buried in the sands of Kuwait. The previous decade had seen a booming economy and the federal government had been running a surplus.

But some people saw the underlying fear and fragility, and, in a morning, started us terrorizing and tearing down ourselves and each other.

The lives lost that morning were a tragedy. So too the lives lost since. And so too all the years lost from all of our lives as we’ve been transfixed and terrorized by the media circus.

Eighteen years later, we’re still playing their game by their rules. We’re doing what they hardly dared to hope — ripping our culture apart in a vain attempt to prove our strength.

Imagine if bin Laden woke up one morning to the news that Donald Trump just called off a meeting with the Taliban at Camp David. Do you think he’d declare his mission accomplished, or would it still be too soon?

Eighteen years later, we’re still strong enough and still free enough to face the fear and choose a different path. Not one that denies evil and enmity in the world, but one that doesn’t terrorize everyone in the name of Freedom®.

We could give al Qaeda their own “mission accomplished” moment. We could show that there’s a whole lot more native strength in this population than they ever bargained for. That shouldn’t be too much greatness to ask for, should it?

We could decide that two decades of fear and fraternal violence were more than enough, couldn’t we? We could turn back from the path of fear, and begin again our slow painful beautiful quest to become “somewhat more free.“

***

In loving memory of Langston Hughes, Molly Ivins, and Brian Doyle.

“What is school for?” is a big, thorny question.

One way to sidle up to it is to ask the question of each part of school: this assignment, this stress, this grade, this requirement …

What’s it for?

The obvious answer is that it’s for learning — which begs the question, what’s that for?

For a tiny minority of people, learning is the foundation for more learning. These are the true professional scholars, and their vocation is precious.

For most people, though, the purpose of learning is more practical. They acquire ideas in order to make things happen in the world. Ideas can be things in this sense, but the idea for a smartphone is in a different category from theoretical computer science.

It’s not easy to go from ideas to action. And it’s not often effectively taught, especially not by teachers who are vocational scholars.

But, for both the scholarly minority and the practical majority, what it’s for is to learn how to use our minds to create work that matters.

One of the best things you can learn in school is good taste.

This has nothing to do with what you eat, wear, or listen to.

Rather, it’s about learning what qualifies as good work in your field, and where the standards for good work come from.

It’s also about developing a more nuanced understanding of who’s who and what’s what — mapping the networks, understanding influence and influencers, and seeing underneath the bumper-sticker labels of particular sectors.

Even if you’re a generalist, you need to have some specific domain expertise. No one hires a consultant; they hire an organizational strategist.

If you’re going to be the person to call, it’s worth having demonstrably excellent taste in organizations, strategy, and communication.

I once read that paratroopers in training have to make a series of jumps from progressively higher towers, with more and more gear to slow their fall, before they finally leap out of a real airplane with a real parachute.

At one point, they have to jump from an 18-foot tower — precisely the height (I read) at which the brain is at the most stressful balance between “This is really high up” and “Landing is really gonna hurt!”

Lower, and you can convince yourself the fall won’t be too bad. Higher, and you can’t really imagine the fall.

Now consider two options.

One, an online course offered by a trustworthy person. It’s not accredited, but you’re confident it delivers what it promises. It costs $5,000 and runs for 4–8 weeks.

The other, a master’s course offered by a famous college. It’s accredited, but it’s really hard to measure its efficacy (if you care to measure that sort of thing). It costs $150,000 and runs for two years.

Think about it for a moment: which one feels more expensive?

If it’s the $5,000 option, it might be worth making an 18-foot jump before leaping from 30,000 feet. Like the acceleration due to gravity, student loans compound quickly.

There are now more than $1 trillion in outstanding student loans in the United States.

It’s no secret that that’s delaying and distorting all kinds of traditional growing-up milestones: careers, marriages, home-buying, and child-rearing, to name just a few.

That’s painful enough now for a generation trying to define a new adulthood in the new economy.

But the real question is what this means a couple of decades from now, when our children are reaching traditional college age: if the Millennials and Gen Z-ers are still paying off our own college debts and we don’t have our parents’ pre-2008 home equity that allowed a big chunk of us to go to college, who will be able to attend?

If current trends continue, I expect we’ll also see a continuation of the great sorting: college (especially famous colleges) will become a luxury good for the very wealthy and some number of scholarship students.

But it’s hard for me to imagine those of us who lived the home equity-leveraged suburban dream in the first couple decades of this century willingly signing ourselves and our kids up for another couple of trillion dollars in debt.

If the question for sorting the course list is “what’s it for?”, the question to make sense of your transcript is “how are you going to talk about it?”

Your classes, your grades, your extracurriculars … all of them tell a story.

And it’s your job to tell that story effectively. Don’t leave it up to the mind of the beholder.

Being a generalist can be a great move — especially if you’re interested in taking responsibility and leadership roles.

The question is how to educate yourself as a generalist. No one can read the entire library.

Even a gen-ed, core, or unstructured curriculum only provides a certain type of breadth. It will not necessarily prepare you to succeed as a generalist, per se.

Successful generalists don’t merely know a little about a lot. Instead, they’re successful because they’re able to connect the dots between the things they genuinely know something about.

So go ahead and make this gutsy move. But be prepared to take even more ownership for which dots you collect and connect. Finding coherence within a prospectus is, after all, good preparation for the work of a real-world generalist.

School provides a huge menu of possible metrics to chase.

GPA is a popular one.

So are things like number of friends, number of in-class comments (most or fewest), number of activities, number of pages in a given paper, amount of assigned reading to complete, prestigious jobs and internships, and many more.

There is often immense pressure to pick certain metrics: successful people are overcommitted, the culture seems to say. Or, lack of preparation is a status symbol.

The question is, do you know which metric you’re currently chasing?

And is it in fact a metric worth chasing?

This is worthwhile question in many contexts, and it’s one I haven’t heard asked nearly often enough in or about school.

The base rate is what you get without taking any action: the interest rate on your savings account, for example, or the total return of the S&P 500.

It seems reasonable to assert that part of the promise of higher education (or indeed any education) is that it raises performance above what you might expect without any intervention.

That begs the question, what’s the correct base rate for education? Crudely, it has to do with how much growth you’d expect from a smart, driven student in the company of other smart, driven students over a given period of time.

Most college students also have the benefit of prefrontal cortex maturation between the ages of 18–22, and many grad students have the advantage of previous work experience.

So the base rate for college or grad school ought to be the kind of growth you’d expect from several hundred really smart people spending several years together.

And the question is, how much more does school provide? And how much should it?

A small litany of topics not sufficiently covered in the average curriculum anymore:

• Relationships
• Money and finance
• Civics
• History
• Philosophy
• Classics
• Writing
• Public speaking and persuasion
• The internet (how it works and what it means)
• Leadership
• The scientific method
• How to learn

These are all foundational building blocks of education. The world expects that we know them, and may take advantage of us if we don’t. (Just consider compound interest.)

And yet so much more is known about all of these subjects than most of us are ever actually taught.

The best time to build these foundations was at the beginning. But there has never been a better time to shore up what was not assigned or cemented before.

If you find yourself in the all-too-common position of working on the dome of a cathedral built on sand, consider carefully whether it might be worth coming down from the scaffold from time to time.