This is a column about two ways of thinking about your life. The first is what you might call the Well-Planned Life. It was nicely described by Clayton Christensen in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review, in an essay based on a recent commencement talk.

Christensen advised the students to invest a lot of time when they are young in finding a clear purpose for their lives. “When I was a Rhodes scholar,” he recalls, “I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth.

“That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it ”” and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.”

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The Education Secretary said he would be “interested” to look at proposals for non-religious schools from figures such Professor Richard Dawkins.

Prof Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said last month that he approved of the idea of setting up a “free-thinking” school.

The comments follow the publication of Coalition plans to give parents’ groups, teachers and charities powers to open their own schools at taxpayers’ expense.

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Blame Tom Sawyer: Americans have a skewed view of childhood and summertime. We associate the school year with oppression and the summer months with liberty. School is regimen; summer is creativity. School is work and summer is play. But when American students are competing with children around the globe who may be spending four weeks longer in school each year, larking through summer is a luxury we can’t afford. What’s more, for many children ”” especially children of low-income families ”” summer is a season of boredom, inactivity and isolation.

Deprived of healthy stimulation, millions of low-income kids lose a significant amount of what they learn during the school year. Call it “summer learning loss,” as the academics do, or “the summer slide,” but by any name summer is among the most pernicious ”” if least acknowledged ”” causes of achievement gaps in America’s schools….

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Representatives of European theological faculties and church theological institutes have warned against universities dropping the teaching of theology in favour of religious studies that are seen as a more general approach.

“Theology has a major role to play within the university by countering stereotypes, demonstrating ways of dealing with religious conflict, and working out its own unique specificity in dialogue with other disciplines,” said Orthodox Metropolitan Emmanuel of France, the president of the Conference of European Churches.

He was speaking in the Austrian city of Graz at a meeting of theological faculties in Europe.

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There may be no country on the planet more vulnerable to a massive cyberattack than the United States, where financial, transportation, telecommunications and even military operations are now deeply dependent on data networking.

What’s worse: U.S. security officials say the country’s cyberdefenses are not up to the challenge. In part, it’s due to a severe shortage of computer security specialists and engineers with the skills and knowledge necessary to do battle against would-be adversaries. The protection of U.S. computer systems essentially requires an army of cyberwarriors, but the recruitment of that force is suffering.

“We don’t have sufficiently bright people moving into this field to support those national security objectives as we move forward in time,” says James Gosler, a veteran cybersecurity specialist who has worked at the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Energy Department.

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I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins….

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The share of borrowers who default on their student loans is bigger than the federal government’s short-term data suggest, with thousands more facing damaged credit histories and millions more tax dollars being lost in the long run.

According to unpublished data obtained by The Chronicle, one in every five government loans that entered repayment in 1995 has gone into default. The default rate is higher for loans made to students from two-year colleges, and higher still, reaching 40 percent, for those who attended for-profit institutions.

The numbers represent thousands of students like Lourdes Samedy, of Boston, who ended up defaulting on about $7,000 in student loans after completing a nine-month-long medical-assistant program at Corinthian Colleges Inc. Everest College, and now cannot get a job.

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Middle School students are champion time-wasters. And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance. Put the two together at home, without hovering supervision, and logic suggests that you won’t witness a miraculous educational transformation.

Still, wherever there is a low-income household unboxing the family’s very first personal computer, there is an automatic inclination to think of the machine in its most idealized form, as the Great Equalizer. In developing countries, computers are outfitted with grand educational hopes, like those that animate the One Laptop Per Child initiative, which was examined in this space in April. The same is true of computers that go to poor households in the United States.

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

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These two studies feed into the debate that is now surrounding Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows.” Carr argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture. He cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation.

Carr’s argument has been challenged. His critics point to evidence that suggests that playing computer games and performing Internet searches actually improves a person’s ability to process information and focus attention. The Internet, they say, is a boon to schooling, not a threat.

But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.

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[ELEANOR] BEARDSLEY: In France, 100 percent of three, four and five-year-olds attend preschool. So everyone starts first grade on an equal footing. While the French do recognize problems with many aspects of their education system, ecole maternelle is held in high regard. It is one of the cherished symbols of the French Republic, embodying both equal treatment for all and the emancipation of women.

Chicago-native Barbara Legron(ph) says she has been able to work full-time with no worries since her daughter Natasha began attending ecole maternelle.

Ms. BARBARA LEGRON: I was very skeptical at first, to send her there for basically all day. But eventually as the year went on, I realized that she was learning so much. I mean, she was teaching me rhymes, French nursery rhymes that I should’ve been teaching her. So she’s having a good time, she’s learning and she’s with other kids, so she’s playing. And I can’t really compete with that, even though I’m the mom.

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For the past two years, high schools in the town of Enfield, Conn. have preferred the indoor comforts of a church for their graduation ceremonies. But lawyers are now moving to stop the practice after it left some students feeling increasingly out in the cold.

A federal suit filed in May alleged that the public schools had violated the U.S. Constitution, which restricts government entities such as public schools from endorsing a particular religion, the latest flash point in a growing national debate on whether graduations have become too entangled in religion.

Enfield High School and Enrico Fermi High School, cited in the complaint, have decided to hold their ceremonies Wednesday and Thursday in their campus fields after a judge issued an injunction temporarily barring them from holding commencement in First Cathedral Church, in Bloomfield, Conn.

It is unclear if schools are holding more graduations in church or whether individuals are becoming more active in asking courts to stop them. But in recent years, school districts in Wisconsin, Florida and Maryland have also faced suits or threats of litigation over decisions to hold graduations in church.

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The Quebec government plans to appeal a court ruling that found its imposition of a province-wide ethics and religion course on a private Catholic school “totalitarian” and unconstitutional.

The scathing decision issued on Friday by Quebec Superior Court Justice Gérard Dugré was a victory for Montreal’s Loyola High School, a Jesuit boys’ school that has objected to the controversial course since its 2008 introduction.

Loyola had maintained that its curriculum, including instruction on world religions, already covered the government-mandated course material, albeit from a Catholic perspective. When the school applied for an exemption from teaching the new course, it was denied because its proposed course was not sufficiently neutral.

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More than two-thirds of the Charleston County high school students who flunked the state English language arts exit exam entered high school unable to read better than a fourth-grader.

Students’ inability to read likely prevented them from understanding the test, much less answering its content-related questions. And it may have prevented some from earning their high school diploma because they must pass the exam to graduate.

School Superintendent Nancy McGinley said she doesn’t want to see this happen again, and she said that’s why the district is directing its time, energy and money to improving students reading and writing.

“It reaffirms that we have to have a sense of urgency ”¦ to keep reading progress happening because once a student stalls in that area, they are doomed to be a high school dropout or close to it,” she said.

Ugh–read it all.

The first national event of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concluded Saturday night with Justice Murray Sinclair, TRC chair, expressing satisfaction that it had been a “special, excellent start.”

During the event held June 16 to 19, more than 1,000 residential school survivors spoke privately to TRC statement-takers and in some cases, during sharing circles witnessed by the public. The event achieved “remarkable acts of reconciliation,” Sinclair told a crowd gathered for closing ceremonies at the Oodena Circle of The Forks National Historic Site. “We know that this journey is far from complete.”

More than 40,000 people visited the site and took part in various activities during the event, said Sinclair. “We are told this is unprecedented….”

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Marquette University’s decision to withdraw an offer to Jodi O’Brien, a self-described “sexuality scholar” to become Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the Jesuit-led institution continues to divide the faculty. Although Ms. O’Brien reached a settlement with the University last week, her supporters maintain that she is the victim of homophobia. Teachers who criticized the initial job offer say that Ms. O’Brien’s sexual orientation is not what disqualifies her, but rather the fact that her publications disparage Catholic moral teachings on marriage, sexuality and the family.

In a post-settlement letter sent June 9th to the Marquette community, University President Father Robert A. Wild wrote, “[W]e have apologized to Dr. O’Brien for the way in which this was handled and for the upset and unwanted attention that we have caused to this outstanding teacher and scholar.” Yet Fr. Wild also added that he stands by his decision to rescind the employment offer, a decision “made in the context of Marquette’s commitment to its mission and identity.”

The specific nature of the job at issue””as dean Ms. O’Brien would have been charged with helping to implement Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II’s 1990 apostolic constitution intended to revitalize Catholic higher education””may have driven Marquette to back off this particular appointment. But the real story here is that in the upside-down world of Catholic higher education, there is more status in hiring a sexuality scholar who denigrates Catholic teachings on sexuality and marriage than in choosing a serious scholar who might actually support Catholic teachings.

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Public school teacher pensions are a ticking time bomb. They’re short by $933 billion in assets needed to cover promises to retirees, or more than $18,600 per public school pupil.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Caught this on the morning run–really inspiring. Watch it all-KSH.

While discussing the subject of ”vice and virtue”, the students in the Leichhardt Primary ethics class compiled a list of things 10-year-olds consider wicked – stealing pencil cases, telling secrets and lying to secure the last piece of birthday cake.

The litany of sins, carefully devoid of any reference to religious morality, was unintentionally sweet because while children furrow their brows over these issues, adults are clashing over their right to do so.

The trial in 10 NSW schools of secular ethics classes, held as an alternative to special religious education (SRE), has sparked a culture war. It has pitted the faithful against the secular, church against state, and parent against parent. The debate has sparked allegations of lying and scare-mongering from both sides, and feeds into wider anxiety about the forces of militant atheism and the power of church lobby groups.

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The staff of Normandy Crossing Elementary School outside Houston eagerly awaited the results of state achievement tests this spring. For the principal and assistant principal, high scores could buoy their careers at a time when success is increasingly measured by such tests. For fifth-grade math and science teachers, the rewards were more tangible: a bonus of $2,850.

But when the results came back, some seemed too good to be true. Indeed, after an investigation by the Galena Park Independent School District, the principal, assistant principal and three teachers resigned May 24 in a scandal over test tampering.

The district said the educators had distributed a detailed study guide after stealing a look at the state science test by “tubing” it ”” squeezing a test booklet, without breaking its paper seal, to form an open tube so that questions inside could be seen and used in the guide. The district invalidated students’ scores.

Of all the forms of academic cheating, none may be as startling as when educators tamper with children’s standardized tests. But investigations in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Virginia and elsewhere this year have pointed to cheating by educators. Experts say the phenomenon is increasing as the stakes over standardized testing ratchet higher ”” including, most recently, taking student progress on tests into consideration in teachers’ performance reviews.

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In light of the current financial crises, many banks are starting to turn down students’ requests for loans. In some cases, before a degree is even earned. Without a job and without a degree to, presumably, get a higher paying job, these people are left without a way to repay their debts. And, it gets worse”¦.

Whereas the homeowners who defaulted on their loans were able to declare bankruptcy in many cases, student loans cannot be discharged by bankruptcy. In turn, these young people are left with very few options for repayment and are burdened by a debt that is not going away any time soon. The balance will increase through interest, fees, service charges, etc. until it extinguishes their chances to get a home loan or even find a life partner (i.e. many people would rather not take on a $2,000/month payment just to be married to someone).

In reality, many of these new graduates are left with a singular option ”“ the federal Income-Based Repayment plan, or IBR, if they qualify….

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The Broward school district on Monday delivered pink slips to 1,305 teachers, secretaries and maintenance workers as the school district struggles to close a $130 million budget shortfall.

Two days before the school year ends, the district notified 568 teachers and 737 noninstructional employees that they will not have jobs when classes resume in the fall.

“This is the worst possible scenario coming true,” School Board Chairwoman Jennifer Gottlieb said.

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Thw Catholic Church has joined the chorus of religious voices opposing the trial of ethics classes in schools.

It has organised a petition arguing that the classes should not be held ”in competition” with scripture because it means religious children miss out on ethics.

This latest protest, which the Baptist and Uniting churches have also joined, takes a different tack to previous objections.

This latest protest, which the Baptist and Uniting churches have also joined, takes a different tack to previous objections.

Whereas the Anglican church has argued children absorb ethics through the school curriculum and do not need the subject to be taught separately, the Catholics say their children should be able to take ethics classes too.

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(Please note that the title above is from the print edition–KSH)

But while the research compiled in the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care has been widely interpreted as showing the country’s best and worst care, the Dartmouth researchers themselves acknowledged in interviews that in fact it mainly shows the varying costs of care in the government’s Medicare program. Measures of the quality of care are not part of the formula.

For all anyone knows, patients could be dying in far greater numbers in hospitals in the beige regions than hospitals in the brown ones, and Dartmouth’s maps would not pick up that difference. As any shopper knows, cheaper does not always mean better.

Even Dartmouth’s claims about which hospitals and regions are cheapest may be suspect. The principal argument behind Dartmouth’s research is that doctors in the Upper Midwest offer consistently better and cheaper care than their counterparts in the South and in big cities, and if Southern and urban doctors would be less greedy and act more like ones in Minnesota, the country would be both healthier and wealthier.

Read it all from Thursday’s New York Times.

As they walk in hooded robes to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” many students getting their doctorates this spring dream of heading to another university to begin their careers as tenure-track professors.

But when Elena Stover finished her doctorate in September, she headed to the poker tables. Frustrated with the limited opportunities and grueling lifestyle of academia, Stover, 29, decided to eschew a career in cognitive neuroscience for one playing online poker. She got the idea from a UCLA career counselor, who was trying to help her find employment.

“The job market is abysmal, especially within the academic system,” said Stover, who spent six years getting her doctorate at UCLA.

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For the Martin family, the usual morning ritual of getting ready for school and onto the school bus, is a foreign concept.

They live as though school doesn’t exist. They’re at home all day, but they’re not being homeschooled. They’re being “unschooled.” There are no textbooks, no tests and no formal education at all in their world.

“Just picture life without school. So, maybe a weekend. We wake up, and we have breakfast, and we just start pursuing what we’re interested in doing,” said Dayna Martin, a mother of four in Madison, N.H.

I caught this yesterday on the late afternoon run–didn’t know anything about it. I highly recommend the video (just under 8 minutes) but if you cannot do that please read it all.

A federal judge ruled May 31 that a Connecticut school district’s plan to hold graduation ceremonies in a mega-church violates the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state and ordered school officials to find a secular alternative site.

U.S. District Judge Janet Hall handed down a preliminary injunction blocking Enfield Public Schools from holding graduations for two high schools scheduled June 23-24 at The First Cathedral, a 120,000 square-foot facility that is home to an 11,000-member Christian church.

The judge said two seniors at Enfield High School and three parents proved “a likelihood of irreparable harm” if the court did not intervene and “a substantial likelihood of success” in their lawsuit alleging that holding the graduation at the church instead of a neutral site violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“The court’s ruling will ensure that no student or parent has to choose between missing their own graduation and being subjected to a religious environment of a faith to which they do not subscribe, said Alex Luchenitser, senior litigation counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “It is unconstitutional and wrong for a school district to subject students and families to religious messages as the price of attending graduation.”

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Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.

Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she’s been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.

This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.

Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill….

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The exam was simple yet devilish, consisting of a single noun (“water,” for instance, or “bias”) that applicants had three hours somehow to spin into a coherent essay. An admissions requirement for All Souls College here, it was meant to test intellectual agility, but sometimes seemed to test only the ability to sound brilliant while saying not much of anything.

“An exercise in showmanship to avoid answering the question,” is the way the historian Robin Briggs describes his essay on “innocence” in 1964, a tour de force effort that began with the opening chords of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” and then brought in, among other things, the flawed heroes of Stendhal and the horrors of the prisoner-of-war camp in the William Golding novel “Free Fall.”

No longer will other allusion-deploying Oxford youths have the chance to demonstrate the acrobatic flexibility of their intellect in quite the same way. All Souls, part of Oxford University, recently decided, with some regret, to scrap the one-word exam.

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Tuition increases for undergraduates attending public colleges and universities in their home states appear to be all over the map this fall.

The range so far ”” from no change at Maine’s community colleges to double digits at some Virginia and Arizona universities ”” reflect the variety of strategies schools and states are trying to balance their economic challenges with those of students and parents.

“States are starting from different places,” says Julie Bell of the National Conference of State Legislatures. But in general, money for higher education “just isn’t there.”

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