With the last week of school and the joy that comes with graduations — from kindergarten into elementary, 5th grade into middle school, high school into “the world” — there come some disappointments as well. Sometimes the chrysalis we expect to open miraculously into a new stage does not happen so easily or perhaps not at all. For instance, a handful of my 12th grade students did not graduate to walk the stage to Diploma-land.

One of them — a quiet, polite, naturally-gifted writer — had literally a few more hours of “credit recovery” work standing between her and a high school diploma. As a senior, she had the end of the week off. She could have spent the morning, maybe into the early afternoon, and that would have spared her the work of summer school or a GED or the consequences of applying for jobs without any credentials. But the last essay she wrote for me detailed why she doesn’t care about any of that. A deep and earnest thinker, she reasoned that academic learning as she had experienced it didn’t feel challenging or when it did, it was a challenge of tedium. Echoing the great pragmatic philosophy of American history, perhaps unknowingly, she asserted that experience in “the real world” provides all the wisdom anyone ever needs. And she does have a point. Life is the ultimate teacher and test rolled into one. But I disagree with her conclusion, and I wish I had one last chance to convince her of the worth of an academic education.

First of all, I think most public schools (ours in particular) offer excellent challenges, designed and facilitated by teachers who have dedicated great intellectual effort and compassion for the students. I frequently find that young people who claim to be “bored” do not suffer from the failure of teachers to inspire, but instead from their own unwillingness to commit to cooperation with classmates or educational leaders. Excessive pride — even when based on a real talent for independent thought — has ever been the enemy of the search for wisdom.

I have a second, more crucial point, and to make it clear I have to tell a personal story.

At this moment, I am sitting at a lunch table in a grocery store, my black t-shirt covered with fur from the deeply-loved pet cat who I just had put to sleep, at the pet hospital a block away. My family and I had this cat for a little over three years. A rescue kitten with a missing tail (an amputation in infancy? a birth defect?), he moved so quickly my older daughter — age 8 at the time — said he looked like The Flash. I suggested we name him “Wally,” after my favorite one of the comic book characters to bear the name and legacy of that speed-powered superhero. My younger daughter, who was then 3, thought that sounded like the cute robot “Wall-E,” so we all agreed.

As he grew, he retained all the charm of a kitten with none of the repressed killer instinct of the typical house cat. He loved to climb, chase laser pointers, and curl into a ball around your hand, letting you tickle his belly, and in return gnawing on your hand just lightly enough not to leave a mark. Some might call his good-natured affection “dog-like.” He was a perfect family cat and all four humans in the house loved him (as did our other cat, and two dogs).

So when he suddenly lost weight and energy, and the vet’s blood test showed massive liver damage, it shocked and saddened all of us. After an ultrasound, doctors diagnosed him with “FIP,” a feline illness still somewhat mysterious — and incurable — to medicine.

Since he was not yet in great pain, but might soon suffer both pain and incapacitation, we chose to love him for one more week at home, and then to schedule his euthanasia. Already laden with end-of-the-school-year duties, both parental and teacherly, our week became even harder and each of us expressed it through bouts of crying, binge-eating, and Facebook posts of old pictures of Wally.

Last night we had a living wake. The entire family, human and otherwise, gathered in the living room. We turned off electronics, and made snacks and cookies. We told stories about times our enjoyment of Wally filled the entirety of our hearts. We toasted our glasses. My oldest held me tight for a long time, overflowing with love and tears. My wife answered questions about what happens to the dead and those they leave behind. My youngest, age 6 and wise beyond her years, predicted that someday soon we would forget our sadness but never forget our cat. (She was the last to shed tears, trying to cheer and entertain all of us until the moment, this morning, when I loaded Wally into his plastic carrier for the final trip to the doctor. Then we all three held her tight as she cried with the wholeheartedness of the rather young.)

Owning a pet is a person’s declaration to the world that he or she has more love to give. It also creates structure and tasks of responsibility in  an otherwise hectic life. But, to a family with yong children, pet ownership provides one more thing: an education into life itself, and the consequences of love.

Someday, hopefully not soon, and not until a time when all those around her can provide all the emotional support she wants, one of my daughters will live to experience the death of a human they love very much. Death: the guaranteed result of life, and one of the universe’s ways of reminding us that love does not come without cost. And today, the pain of losing Wally will help prepare my girls for the heartache that may someday challenge all they believe. Life is indeed learning from death, and failure, and experience. But we can make measured choices to rehearse, and therefore survive, the slings and arrows of commonplace fortune.

Which brings me to my point: though life truly teaches us whatever wisdom can be had, though the exuberance of youth encourages us to experience all seasons in a day, though the interruption of books and teachers may seem artificial… there is a way to grow as a person that is no less true, that also helps preserve our ability to live and love without turning away.

Many people, such as the high school teacher and reading specialist Kelly Gallagher have noted that reading conscientiously prepares us for life (especially when he quotes philosopher Kenneth Burke that books are “imaginative rehearsals for the real world”). Both fiction and nonfiction communicate all the trials-and-errors of all the philosophies lived by others, who might have been — remember the harm of pridefulness — actually smarter than you and me. Books address us with the mind and with the heart. Sometimes, but not always, the help of a teacher who has experienced the reading (if not also the life lessons), and the cooperation of other students, co-learners on a journey, can greatly enhance this value of books. And that is why reading in general and the academic world in particular have value.

To say that “I will never learn from education or books or academics” is to say the world is not worth examining, that your own world is not worth sharing. In short, turning your back on all that is academic is not an act of creative exuberance, or common sense, but a great act of cynicism.

Now don’t take me the wrong way. The life of an aesthetic monk, or a learned degree, or a liberal arts path does not benefit every person all of the time. It is not the only way. Believe me, I get the lyrics to all those XTC songs (like when Andy Partridge sings “some of your friends are too brainy to see/ that they’re paupers and that’s how they’ll stay” in “Mayor of Simpleton,” 1989). There are people, like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, that come to know their world through a lifetime of hard work and concern for others. I have had the honor of knowing such people. And I have had the honor of reading about them, thanks to writers like Ernest Hemingway and the teachers along the way willing to discuss the hard work represented by all those books.