The value of a "rigorous" education

Walking around the Middlebury campus today, I found myself in a bit of a memory stupor: there was the library that was brand new my senior year ... the window to the economics class I took on a whim ... the dining hall ... my beloved Chateau tower dorm room from sophomore year ...
Within the context of my current residency, though, it reminded me that so much of my identity as a teacher is informed by my identity as a student, and I began to remember beyond the sheer locations to the experiences I had in them: working on my senior thesis, conversing with friends, learning to stretch my learning ... For it was here, in the constellation of my environs, my companions and colleagues, and my thoughts, that I learned to let go of grades. Not that they weren't important, but I have come to see them as ultimately less meaningful to my learning experience than were the content and experience in and of itself. And so I remain, even in my teaching, a self-directed student of life: the entire world is my classroom, and I will never stop learning. Perhaps more importantly, I will never stop wanting to learn.

Brief topic switch ...
I was struck by President Liebowitz' baccalaureate address to the graduating seniors of this year's class (check it out here) on the "work hard, play hard" mentality typical of students at so-called "rigorous" academic institutions. He suggested in his address that perhaps it is the very rigor that the liberal arts tradition prides itself on that is pushing its students to engage in extreme social activity (i.e. binge drinking) that endangers the name and reputation of the tradition, not to mention the aversive effects to one's personal health and the health of one's community. I have to applaud him for making such a suggestion that I'm sure was the controversial subject of many a conversation following his address. However, it got me thinking about my own ideas of what rigor really is in one's education.
As I remember it, the idea - and challenge - of "academic rigor" was considered desirable, because it meant one would be stretched and challenged and ultimately deserve the diploma, the honors, and the job offer at the end. I'm sure my parents, who were paying tuition, were also concerned about the return on their investment, as well. Rigor also emerged in conversation at my graduate program at IslandWood, but we were also concerned about the amount of and value of the experience we had teaching our students. And goodness knows the call for more rigorous academics in public schools, in an effort to increase student performance on standardized tests.
As a student, primarily, I have come to see rigor not in the workload, but in the work itself: the reach of a single assignment into my own cognition and creativity. Bloom's taxonomy suggests several levels of knowing something, the most advanced of which is, according to the revised version, creating something new: is the student able to construct, design, develop, etc. something original based on newly gained knowledge? These have always been my favorite assessments: from supposedly "boring" papers to a creative dramatic performance to my teaching portfolio, I was lucky to "create" quite a bit at Middlebury. And I really wonder whether it wasn't in these assignments that I began to forget about accountability and achievement and, instead, just took joy in what I was learning, what it meant for me as an individual, and what it might come to mean even if I never got a diploma. (For the record, as of this transition, my grades improved significantly!)
I don't know for sure whether Middlebury and other similar institutions need to reassess the rigor of the academic workload assigned students. However, as a teacher, I can only say that I have learned to reassess constantly the quality of the assignments that I do give, to assure that they are not a waste of time for me or my students, and that they might truly inspire a joyful and meaningful learning experience for them. In the end, the rigor of education lies not in the amount of material covered, but in the material that is uncovered by one question.