Sally Thomas (and her daughter) on what education is for:

One night over dinner with her twenty-six new best friends,  the talk turned to the subject of what everyone wanted to be when he or she grew up. The girls, one by one, announced that they wanted to be lawyers. One girl said she wanted to go into politics, maybe. A few other girls thought they'd like to do some corporate kind of job.

At last my daughter's turn came.  "Well," she said, "I want to be a mom."

There was a silence. Finally someone asked, "Then why are you here?"

"Because I think the basic unit of society ought to be educated," my daughter said.

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When people ask what you want to do, unless they're your parents or, say, your wife and the mother of your children, to whom you've just proposed your plan to ditch your job and get a Ph.d, they're not really asking you to explain your strategy for not winding up under the viaduct with lawnmower parts and a plastic Ninja-Turtles wading pool tied to your purloined Dollar Tree shopping cart. Or maybe they are. These days that's an eminently reasonable question. But I think what people really want to know, although they may not know that they want to know this, is what you think education is and why you value it. Why are you bothering to pay all this money and do all this reading and lose all this sleep? What do you hope to get out of it, at the far end, which will have made what you put into it worthwhile? What kind of life, what kind of finished and polished and actualized self, is worth this level of investment?

Of course, you never know. Maybe you think you'll wind up with a polished, actualized, employed self, in the field of your starry career dreams, but then again, maybe you won't. My husband got  Ph.d and then went to work for  a time as a very highly-educated security guard. When he started the Ph.d, people asked him what he planned to do  -- it was a Ph.d in theology, so that was a fair enough question -- and his answer was never, "What I really want to do is guard a warehouse full of digital televisions  for twelve hours every day." When it transpired that guarding digital televisions was what he was going to do, I don't think he said to himself, "Well, there's a lifetime of education down the drain." He just took a lot of books with him to work. Ten thousand digital televisions not plugged in are very quiet company, giving a person plenty of time to think.

We've already learned, on the rollercoaster of the housing market, to rethink the way in which we value our homes, not as investment, but as where we live. It's an exercise in reigning in our imaginations, which want to go dashing forward into the future where, so we thought, we'd have built up enough equity to buy a small nation-state and spend the rest of our lives playing Parcheesi in utter contentment, which was why we bought this house and not that one in the first place. Now, as it turns out, we might as well get out the Parcheesi board and be thankful that what our educations prepared us for -- we hope -- was to know how to make contentment, even happiness, out of what we have at hand. Which is never easy at the best of times;  the good thing about a downturn is that it makes us practice more.

Here's the whole thing.