Anthony Romero: I’ve been lucky that I’ve been trained at some of the best schools in America. I’ve gone to Princeton, I’ve gone to Stanford, I had some great teachers in high school. So I love our educational system, and I think that teachers in public schools taught me enormous amounts, and teachers in private universities and private schools taught me enormous amounts. But I have learned in life. I’ve learned on the street, I’ve learned talking to people. It’s the conversations you remember, it’s the people who make you stop and think differently about something. It’s less the classes I took in college and more about the late night conversations or debates about the world that I remember. It’s the conversations you have with people who are struggling in their lives. That one thought from a taxicab driver that just kind of sticks with you and makes you think differently. Or talking to someone who’s about to lose their home and finds themselves in eviction proceedings. Or talking to someone on death row, and understanding how they still find meaning in their life, and why it is important to safeguard the sanctity of life, that life is precious. That there’s even a sense of the human spirit even for people on death row. It’s not the same thing to be on death row as to be executed — there is life, there’s thought. So I’ve learned most from my interactions with the people, conversations with people, traveling overseas, little interactions. Arguments are sometimes places you can learn. You can learn how to be wrong, you can learn how to apologize. So I think life is an education. I think the schools of higher learning and the public schools and the private schools are great, but they’re only training ground for the real education, which is living, which is life, which is the beauty of walking outside a door and confronting something new and unexpected and learning how to adapt to it.