I used to work at this little liberal-arts college in Wisconsin called Ripon College. Great little school with awesome people. One of their most-used phrases when talking about the value of a liberal education was that it supposedly engendered “lifelong learning” as a value. I’d really drank the Kool-Aid there so that sounded really nifty to me. You’re never too old to learn new things. Cool.

To be honest though, I had a pretty narrow view of that. When I pondered the phrase, I mostly pictur...