"My classmates from Cambridge believed the sky was their limit. And they were willing to work their tails off to reach that limit. My classmates from the University of Birmingham believed they would get what they deserved. And they waited for their just rewards to come to them."
This comment by a colleague who attended undergraduate programs at both Cambridge and the U of Birmingham. The context was a bunch of friends from work at the pub on a summer evening talking about what they got out of an education.
This comment cuts deep. I heard it last summer and it's still in easy-access memory. The start of the recruiting season just brought it to the top of my mind.
The most talked about and researched aspects of an elite education are selection, training and access. Yet, quite possibly, the most important value derived from an education is in shaping these deeply-held, pre-cognitive notions of identity and destiny. These deeply-held notions of self are what shape behaviour, and therefore learning, and therefore achievement.
A sense of one's identity and destiny need not come from education. But the only equally powerful source of that sense of self, of that source of integrity, is probably family.
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