My dad’s dad, John Joseph Reilly, used to say that. A strange quote from an educator — he was a high school social studies teacher in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.
Grandpa Reilly died before I was born, when my dad was only a freshman at Davidson College. All I know of Grandpa Reilly I know from my dad — that he kept a piece of the Berlin Wall on his desk, that he had his students paint a world map on their classroom wall, that he would have been at every one of my basketball games.
For much of my life, Grandpa Reilly’s anti-academy tagline rarely resonated with me. Elementary, middle, high school — I kept my head down, got my grades and did little else. I was content. I loved school. Then I came to Cornell.
Maybe it was the freedom, the lack of rules. Maybe it was the repetitive Environment and Sustainability classes that my University of Vermont transfer credits somehow didn’t satisfy. Or maybe it was the loose attendance policies (which I carefully studied to calculate the fewest number of classes I would have to attend to earn an A; a strategy which more often resulted in a B). Whatever it was, I no longer found adequate joy in attending class.
Joining The Sun as a news writer and working my way up to assistant managing editor had its own set of sacrifices. Staying late nights at 139 W State St. and being on call 24/7 meant sleeping through morning classes, quitting my job as a research assistant and devoting less time to relationships. But everything I lost, I gained in education.
For example, on Halloween night 2023, when I should have been out on the town, I was on the phone with my dad. A suspect had been charged for posting antisemitic threats, and he was scheduled to appear in court the next morning. I wanted to go, but I would lose attendance points on a lecture and discussion section. My dad’s advice was familiar, no, familial — “don’t let school get in the way of your education.” 10 hours later, I crammed into a car with four fellow Sunnies, and I was on my way to Syracuse.
That morning, as my classmates watched slides on a screen, my classroom was a courtroom. Sitting beside 20 professional reporters, I heard a mother hold back tears as her mentally ill son stepped handcuffed beside his public defender. And I watched as Patrick Dai, through shaky and scared breath, admitted to authoring the violent, vile posts as his prosecutor read them aloud.
No law course can tell you what it’s really like in a courtroom. No semester in psychology can predict how a mother feels when she sees her son in an orange jumpsuit. No journalism course can teach you how to beat CNN on a story. Don’t let school get in the way of your education.
These lessons soon became continuous. Covering the encampment protests forced me to balance my journalistic principles with my care for our community, interviewing President Michael Kotlikoff taught me how to ask tough questions of authority, and reporting on a meeting between top administrators and parents showed me how Cornell’s “content-neutral” policies can be differentially communicated. These moments were more valuable than any university class.
I do not mean that school is unimportant, that academia is useless. How else can I justify to myself the hundreds of thousands of dollars that I dropped on a Cornell diploma? Hell, I still dream of earning a Ph.D., of taking after Grandpa Reilly and becoming a teacher. School must matter.
But school is not everything. If it were, I would never know how many more stars you can see through a pair of binoculars, how to hang a hammock where not even sadness can find you. How silent Beebe Lake sleeps. These are Life’s lessons.
My message is this — don’t ditch every class, but when academics inhibit extracurricular education, make the tradeoff. Those moments mean more than any lecture or letter grade. Don’t let school get in the way of your education.
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Eric Reilly is a graduating senior from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He served as the Assistant Managing Editor on The Sun’s 142nd Masthead and News Editor on the 141st Masthead. He can be reached at ereilly@cornellsun.com.