Thanksgiving dinners and the real purpose of education

November 25, 2025

There is a particular quality to the silence that falls over Thanksgiving tables when someone, an aunt, perhaps, or a well-meaning family friend, asks a high school junior what they want to study. Watch the young person's face: that flicker of something between hope and dread, the careful calibration of an answer designed to satisfy without committing, to sound purposeful without being pinned down. Watch the parents: the almost imperceptible lean forward, the quiet hunger to hear their child articulate something, anything, that sounds like a future taking shape.

We are in the season of early action deadlines and deferred dreams, of Common Application essays revised past recognition and test scores that seem to carry the weight of destiny. And yet what strikes me most, after years of sitting across from families navigating this passage, is how rarely we pause to ask what we're actually preparing these young minds for.

Virginia Woolf wrote that "the eyes of others are our prisons; their thoughts our cages." How much of the college application process, the curated extracurriculars, the strategic summer programs, the essays workshopped until the original voice is barely audible, is an elaborate performance for those watching eyes? How much is architecture built not around the actual shape of a mind, but around what we imagine admissions committees want to see?

I come from generations of educators. A Nobel laureate ancestor founded an entire university. A grandfather taught how to parse the hidden connections between Sanskrit and Greek; a grandmother taught young girls to see the elegant mechanics of physics. They all understood something we risk forgetting: that education is not the filling of a vessel but the lighting of a fire, to borrow from Plutarch, Plato, Yeats, or whoever said it. Yet somewhere between their classrooms and our current moment, we've become confused. We've mistaken the credentials for the capacity, the résumé for the mind itself.

This week, many of you will sit with your children and talk, or try to talk, about college. You'll notice, perhaps, how practiced their answers have become, how smoothly they can recite the expected narrative. But I wonder: when you ask them what they're curious about, do they still know? When you ask what problems make them lean in, what questions they can't stop turning over, do they remember that this is what education is supposed to awaken? 

The saddest conversations I have are with brilliant students who have learned to distrust their own intellectual instincts, who have been so thoroughly coached that they no longer recognize the sound of their own thinking. They can solve differential equations but have forgotten how to wonder. They can write whatever essay the moment demands but have lost the thread of what actually matters to them.

Conrad observed that "the mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future." But this capacity must be cultivated, not merely credentialed. It requires time to think deeply about fewer things rather than skimming across many. It demands the space to be wrong, to pursue dead ends, to discover that failure is often where real learning begins.

I'm not arguing against ambition or excellence. Far from it. My students achieve remarkable things: Ivy League admissions, stellar test scores, competitive internships. But these emerge as natural consequences of something deeper: minds that have been taught to think rigorously, to question probingly, to connect ideas across boundaries.

What I'm suggesting is that the architecture of learning must be built around the learner, not imposed upon them. That sustained partnership, the kind that unfolds over years, not weeks, allows us to understand how a particular mind works, what makes it come alive, where its native genius lies waiting to be discovered and refined.

So perhaps this Thanksgiving, alongside the usual questions about applications and deadlines, we might ask different ones: What are you thinking about that you can't quite articulate yet? What confuses you in the most interesting way? When do you lose track of time because something has captured your full attention?

These questions have no place on a college application. But they have everything to do with whether the education your child ultimately receives will be transformative or merely transactional.

The best teaching, my grandmother used to say, is simply paying exquisite attention to how learning actually happens in the single individual mind before you. Not how it's supposed to happen according to theory or curriculum, but how it actually does.

I'm curious: what conversations are happening at your tables this week? What are your children telling you about what this journey feels like from the inside?

Wishing you a warm and fulfilling holiday!