“What is school for?”

That’s the question that first drew me into Seth Godin’s world. And, having spent an awful lot of time in school, it’s a question I ask myself almost every day.

Though I’d happily start with Seth’s answer — school is for teaching us how to lead and how to solve interesting problems — I want to suggest another purpose here and question one of our common practices.

If we want to lead or to solve interesting problems, it seems to me that we first have to (re)learn how to talk to each other. That’s a badly lost art in our society, and while I don’t want to consign or confine it exclusively to famous colleges, I’d be in favor of seeing some famous colleges take the lead in trying to teach this in a way that actually works.

Here’s the thing: too much of school — both in traditional lecture classes and in the constant parade of eminent speakers on eminent campuses — still presumes that talking at students (or past them, as at many events) will produce people who really know how to talk with each other.

It’s true that reading good books can make you a better writer. But it’s also true that writing requires practice. We don’t teach it by having people read, read, read for 22 or more years, hoping they’ll be magically capable of writing once they hit the real world.

What’s a college? Among other things, it’s a group of still-malleable minds cooped up together along with world-class mentors for a number of years. In other words, it seems like the perfect opportunity to teach people how to really talk to each other.

What might we do differently if we started acting as if that wasn’t just a latent possibility but in fact a big part of what school is really for?

Who are you? Who are you called to be? Who are you free to be?

Questions of individual identity are raging, and for understandable reasons. The results are understandable, too — even if, collectively, they’re not always as freeing as the journey into individual self-expression.

So much of our culture asks “Who are you?” So much of it rewards uniqueness. Nobody ever really became an Internet sensation by being “average” or “normal.”

But what if the real question is: “Who are you called to be in the context of us?” How would you express your identity then?

Would you really want to bring the culture of performative identity that thrives in social media “communities” (and upon which those communities thrive) into the in-real-life public square?

When you — all of you — join all of us, who bends who, and how much? Who do you need to become for us, and who do we need to become for you?

What might civility look and feel like if we relaxed the demand for conformity?

Identity is a big deal right now.

So are marketing and selling — especially the race-to-the bottom kind. “This thing happened.” “Look at us!” “See what we did there?”

Individual identity is capturing most of the headlines these days, but I think the real stories are in institutional identity. In the corporate world, for example, storytelling-as-advertising is still an early outline of the kinds of corporate identities that we’ll see in this century.

But what about institutions dedicated to the public good: government agencies, universities, non-profit and social enterprises?

The temptation, especially when cash-strapped, is to focus on “buzz” and selling rather than identity. And, with so many of these institutions feeling so strapped so much of the time, the end result is a lot of selling and telling rather than showing.

Yes, the short term might be painful. But what will really kill us in the long term is debasing the mission by nonsense marketing (buzz for the sake of buzz and nothing more) or putting strategy and identity up for sale.

When institutions sell their identities piecemeal, it says they don’t know who they are today — and they probably won’t like who they are tomorrow.

Americans have long held their public servants to a higher standard of behavior (at least rhetorically) than citizens in other countries.

But the nature of the expectation — and its enforcement mechanisms — is rapidly changing.

Once, there were tacit bounds on what could and should be brought to light. That system had obvious flaws: if opponents (and journalists) basically agreed on the rules of the game and how fouls were to be called, similar indiscretions could remain out of the public eye.

Now, everything is documented for everyone, forever. As more Gen Xers and Millennials enter public life, it’s never going to be about deciphering some handwritten calendar from high school again. And, as we review people’s online permanent records, it will be really hard to simply stop at a certain age, or to agree on which parts of a timeline count and which do not.

So what are we going to do — or let others do — with all this information?

One option is to make (or accept) the “if you’re a star, they let you do it” argument. In that scenario, we give in to the ultimate cynicism of the digital age: the more likes you get (usually for being outrageous), the more outrageous you can be.

At the other extreme, we might see people begin preparing for public (political) life by ruthlessly curating their public (Internet) life from a young age. Whether or not it is possible to craft a perfectly clean digital storyline anymore, it’s worth wondering what sort of character this process might produce.

We’ve always conflated private and public morality, always looked at decisions over a long timeline, and (especially in recent decades) demanded that no one change their views, ever. But that’s clearly unsustainable, and so we’re stuck with a question: will we give in to cynicism, or try to impose the old rules on the new world at the risk of distorting reality even further?

Or will we will accept the invitation of radical digital transparency to create new, more realistic and participatory expectations for the kinds of behavior, discretion, and consistency we demand from our public figures?

If you were advising a twentysomething (or even a thirtysomething) who wanted to make a difference today, where would you send her: consulting, entrepreneurship, or government?

My favorite take on consulting is Marina Keegan’s 2011 essay “Even Artichokes Have Doubts, in which she tries to understand why, in the first decade of this century, about 25 percent of her fellow Yale graduates found work as consultants or bankers — especially when so few of them started college dreaming of either job.

Saturday afternoon at the Boston Book Festival, I heard Anand Giridharadas throw a big bucket of cold water on entrepreneurship in discussing his latest book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. I still need (and very much want) to read the book, but I basically agree with the position he outlined aloud: in the past four decades or so, we’ve relentlessly cut back on the provision of public goods and trained ourselves to celebrate private philanthropy instead — in spite of its obvious tendency to deliver inferior or ineffective goods in ways that only reinforce inequity. Why, then, are so many young people striving to create social ventures?

But what about government, really? If it’s true that, at least at the highest levels, government is in thrall to the kind of “philanthrocapitalism” Giridharadas deplores in and from the private sector, are young people who choose government more likely to make a difference than their peers who choose consulting, finance, or entrepreneurship?

I suspect that framing the question by sector, as I did at the top, is to abandon all hope. Rather, drawing on Henry Mintzberg’s work (cf. Managers, Not MBAs), I suspect the best answer is another question: not “Which sector does the most good?”, but rather “In which sector am I most prepared to take responsibility for the long term?”

I suspect it’s possible to learn something or help someone in almost any sector we choose. The important thing is to recognize and respect the limits of each, and to try to act responsibly — regardless of sector.

It’s amazing how many times I’ve heard the word “pivot” used to describe career paths and plans in the last couple of years. Either someone recently pivoted and has gone to grad school to learn more about the new direction, or they saw the direction they wanted to pivot and went to grad school to make that happen.

One of the great joys of school has long been the encounter with new people and ideas that change views and plans and careers. But sometimes it seems there’s a temptation to start pivoting and never stop: after all, tomorrow might bring some new piece of information that changes the direction we feel today.

Recently, I was listening to the latest episode of Seth Godin’s podcast, Akimbo. It’s called “You’re It: The power (and the myth) of getting picked.” In that show, Seth talks about how, in today’s economy, it makes no sense to wait around for a traditional gatekeeper to pick us: we have to raise our own hands and find our own way.

And that made me wonder: how much of our “pivoting” is really just turning from authority to authority, hoping they’ll pick us? What if we changed our attitude from “I tried something, and now I want to try something else” to “I noticed something, and here’s what I’m going to do about it”?

How many times do we have to “pivot” before we feel comfortable enough to pick ourselves?