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When I heard the news that my father has been wheelchair stricken I was very disturbed. It did not come as a surprise because from my previous visits, I could see that his legs were becoming more and more deformed from the effects of arthritis. He had to move very slowly in order not to loose his balance.

I knew that even in his old age, my father values the freedom to do activities on his own very much. On the phone, he sounded very frustrated when he related how he was not able to go out to buy food, attend to his banking needs, buy medicines and vitamins or just taking walks outdoors anymore.

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What is it in a human that demands education beyond all bounds, beyond all other of nature’s creatures? Ridley’s Sea turtles hatch out of their eggs, buried in the warm sand where his mother had hatched out of her egg, and instantly know to make a break for the never-yet seen ocean, the ocean whose waves try to push them back to shore. No one instructs them. The Artic tern knows its migratory way from the North Pole to Antarctica and back. A humpback whale may be with her mother five years, up to ten years for a chimp, but we humans go beyond all bounds. 18 years at home, thirteen of them in school (15 if you count preschool), and then for many another four years in college. I don’t even want to go into graduate and post-doc calculations. Why do we need so much education? What do turtles have that we don’t? What puts us on a slower learning curve than a wide-ranging bird? And that’s just in earthly matters. Give man an eternal soul and there is all that spiritual education, education that dare never quit in a human’s life, to take into account. How come we are always in need of teachers, be they in the classroom or in the pulpit?

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