"School's out," the famous Alice Cooper song goes, and for countless students across the world, it indeed is (or soon will be).  Finals are being taken, graduations observed, degrees awarded, commencement speeches prepared.  We see smiling graduates and parents, people still facing finals, filled with angst, teachers ready for a break, school bus drivers winding down, and more.  Another pedagogical season is drawing to a close.
     For those of us who don't like school, blame the ancient Sumerians.  It was they, archaeologists tell us, who developed the first schools, lining up students in rows on benches in mud brick buildings, their writing implement a triangular stylus, their writing paper, clay.
     We've come a long way, perhaps, although education remains, for many, an nearly impossible goal to attain.  Far too many people around the world do not have access to formal learning, and far too many people around the planet wallow in illiteracy. Ironically, for some in the affluent West, education can seem a burden; however, for many in other parts of the world, it is a tremendous privilege.
     As students of affluence celebrate their "freedom," they do well to remember that freedom, although it has certainly been identified as liberation from various forms of physical oppression, is even more passage into a new way of seeing.  When we are set free, we see the world in a different way.  So says psychology, and so says religion. Freedom begats, often in seminal ways, newness of perspective.
     We can set ourselves free from every form of physical bondage, but we usually can only set ourselves from mental or spiritual chains by invoking the help of another being.
Maybe that's why the apostle Paul, in writing about spiritual newness, said, "If any person is in Christ, she is a new creation.  The old has passed away; all things have become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17).  A highly educated individual, Paul nevertheless grasped that genuine learning, that is, learning about what really matters, begins with realizing that we only see clearly when we know, physically as well as intellectually, what is most true.