All over the United States and in many countries, students are donning caps and gowns or other traditional vestiges of academia and graduating from high schools, colleges or universities. May and early June is traditionally the time when students who have completed their studies walk down the aisle and collect hard-earned diplomas.
Personal education always has been an important part of the gospel. Secular training can enhance a person's ability to provide for a family. It also broadens perspectives, enriches understanding and helps a person appreciate the many beautiful things in the world.
In general, people understand the value of an education. A recent Detroit News analysis, for example, found that 40 percent of the people who receive public cash assistance in Michigan are high school dropouts, and that they cost the state $156 million per year. The paper also found that about 70 percent of the inmates at the state's prisons are dropouts, and that their care and feeding costs taxpayers about $200 million per year.
In addition, the dropouts themselves are twice as likely to be unemployed than are people who finish high school, and they are even more likely to live in poverty. When they do get jobs, they tend to earn much less than those who finished school.
Those statistics are unlikely to surprise many people. The results of secular learning are tangible and immediate. But what about spiritual learning? Does it not make sense that people who make personal study of the scriptures a regular part of their lives, combined with sincere prayer and meaningful worship, are more ready to return to our Heavenly Father than those who have been amply blessed with the resources of the restored gospel and yet do nothing?
Spiritual poverty is every bit as real as, and far more dangerous than, material poverty.
Throughout history, prophets have emphasized that conversion and baptism are only the beginning of the road to eternal life. In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Nephi makes it clear that much more is needed:
"Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus sayeth the Father: Ye shall have eternal life" (2 Nephi 31:20).
Modern prophets have taught that secular learning should always be balanced with spiritual learning, and that spiritual learning is of a far more lasting value. President J. Reuben Clark Jr. of the First Presidency said: "There is spiritual learning just as there is material learning, and the one without the other is not complete; yet, speaking for myself, if I could have only one sort of learning, that which I would take would be the learning of the spirit, because in the hereafter I shall have opportunity in the eternities which are to come to get the other, and without spiritual learning here my handicaps in the hereafter would be all but overwhelming" (in Conference Report, April 1934, p. 94).
Speaking to young people, President Spencer W. Kimball said: "Youth, beloved youth, can you see why we must let spiritual training take first place? Why we must pray with faith, and perfect our own lives like the Savior's? Can you see that the spiritual knowledge may be complemented with the secular in this life and on for eternities but that the secular without the foundation of the spiritual is but like the foam upon the milk, the fleeting shadow? ("Beloved Youth, Study and Learn," in Life's Directions: A Series of Fireside Addresses, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1962, p. 190).
Just as a lack of secular learning can doom a person to a life with few choices and little opportunity to advance, so a life without spiritual learning can doom a person to an eternity of limited options. The Savior made it clear that He is the pathway to an eternity of endless opportunities. As He said, "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:31-32).
For students, graduation day should never mark the end of learning. Each profession demands continual training and study. In a real sense, graduation day is a commencement of a lifetime of learning.
So it is for spiritual study, too. It is a lifelong pursuit.
