If your life were a game of basketball, your education would be the ball.

You can do many things with it — and you can’t do anything without it.

President-Elect Barack Obama knows a little about basketball: He plays regularly and he’s said to be pretty good.

He also knows that every problem he wants to solve as president will involve education.

“The decisions we make about how to educate our children will shape our future for generations to come,” the president-elect said last week.

And then he announced that he had picked a highly educated basketball buddy to lead the nation’s effort to improve schools, attract great teachers and give kids better opportunities to learn.

In choosing Arne Duncan to be secretary of education, Obama picked a leader who was an Academic All-American as co-captain of the basketball team at prestigious Harvard University.

More significantly, he chose an educator who has taken risks and made “tough decisions” to give kids a better education.

As head of the nation’s third largest school system in Chicago, Illinois, Duncan has shut down bad schools, supported innovative charter schools and backed “master teaching” programs that reward teachers for improving student performance.

He has made more demands on teachers and principals, but also has reached out to them to find new solutions. And he has challenged parents and the community to stay involved in schools.

“When faced with tough decisions, Arne doesn’t blink,” Obama said. “ … He doesn’t hesitate for one minute to do what needs to be done. ... When Arne speaks to educators across America, it …[is] from the lessons he’s learned … changing our schools from the bottom up.”

Arne Duncan first got to know Barack Obama when they played pickup basketball together in the 1990s in Chicago.

The 6’5” Duncan, who had played in a pro basketball league in Australia, was running a program providing better schooling opportunities for poor children on the city’s South Side.

Obama and Duncan talked a lot about how to improve city public schools, and when Duncan became head of the Chicago school district seven years ago the two became closer.

In Obama’s political career, Duncan has been a frequent advisor on education issues and helped write the education plan Obama promoted during his campaign.

Obama and Duncan share a belief that the earlier education starts, the better off children will be.

Obama’s education plan calls for spending $10 billion on early childhood education programs that would benefit children as young as toddlers.

Every dollar spent early, they say, saves money that might need to be spent later to help kids catch up.

“No issue is more pressing than education,” Duncan said last week. “Whether it’s fighting poverty, strengthening our economy or promoting opportunity, education is the common thread. It is the civil rights issue of our generation.”