GRADUATION
SPEECH
Three weeks ago I promised you
that I would give this speech more thought and preparation than any other I
have given. And that has been the
case. This will certainly be the last
time I will ever address you all together, as a group, and I hope that at least
a few of my thoughts will have a lasting impact on at least a few of you. These are carefully chosen words and they are
delivered with a sincerity borne out of genuine affection and concern for the
vital yet fragile embodiment of human existence before my eyes, for you, generation 2007.
Some of you have been at this
school for sixteen years – that’s a long time in the life of a 19 year
old! 84% to be precise. Of course you are only here for seven hours a
day (actually six in Primary and four and a half in Kinder, giving an average
of 6.0625) which brings that figure down to 21%. And if we take away weekends and holidays it
comes down to 11%. Then of course we
have to consider the absences, late arrivals, classes missed for a coffee in Sanborns or a cigarette around the corner, visits to the
doctor, the dentist, the passport office, the cartilla,
etc, etc, which probably gets us to under 10%.
But even that is a long time – over 14,000 hours!
So what was it all for? What did you learn? What is
education?
Perhaps it is easier to start
by saying what it isn’t:
§
Education is not only the acquisition
of knowledge
§
Education is not just about learning
skills
§
Education is not simply a preparation
for work
§
Education is not primarily a passport
to economic success
§
Education is not the accumulation of
certificates and diplomas
§
Education is not about winning and
losing, nor is it about winners and losers
Some or all of these may be
by-products of education but they are not the essence of education. At the roots of education is that which we fear
most, that which we spend much of our energy hiding from, driving us to our
most foolhardy and thoughtless actions: self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge is at the heart
of education, yet it is the most elusive, the most challenging, the most
sublime entity. It obeys Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle: the very act of acquiring self-knowledge alters the self
that does the knowing and thus requires us to continue the never ending search.
Kahlil Gibran has this to say about self-knowledge:
Your
hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But
your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
You
would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You
would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.
And
it is well you should.
The
hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And
the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But
let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And
seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For
self is a sea boundless and measureless.
Say
not, ‘I have found the truth’, but rather, ‘I have found a truth’.
Say
not, ‘I have found the path of the soul.’ Say rather, ‘I have met the soul
walking upon my path’.
For
the soul walks upon all paths.
The
soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The
soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.
This spiritual dimension that
sets us apart from other animals, the capacity to look inside ourselves and to
reflect, is at the heart of education and is the key to fulfilment as human
beings. But it doesn’t come easily. Fernando Savater,
in El Valor de Educar, quoting Graham Greene, reminds us that to
become human is a moral duty of any human being, but warns that some will fail
and some will not even attempt to become human:
Nacemos humanos pero eso no basta:
tenemos también que llegar a serlo. ¡Y
se da por supuesto que podemos fracasar en el intento o rechazar la ocasión
misma de intentarlo! Recordemos que Píndero, el gran poeta griego, recomendó enigmáticamente:
“Llega a ser el que eres.”
Perhaps one of the most
significant characteristics of “becoming human” is the capacity to care. Not just to care in the sense of to be
worried about someone or something, to look after someone, or to feel
passionately about something, but care in the deep sense described by Nel Noddings:
When
I look at and think about how I am when I care, I realise that there is
invariably this displacement of interest from my own reality to the reality of
the other.....To be touched, to have aroused in me something that will disturb
my own ethical reality, I must see the other’s reality as a possibility for my
own.......When I am in this sort of relationship with another, when the other’s
reality becomes a real possibility for me, I care.
Closely related to this idea
of care is that of love – one of the most devalued and distorted concepts with
which we are constantly bombarded by the marketing mafias – at best
over-sentimentalised, and at worst packaged as some sort of economic commodity,
that is confused with the physiological entity of sex.
Martin Buber,
in his book I and Thou, explores the difference
between the I-You word and the I-It word, which he claims encompass the two
ways in which we can relate to the world and our fellow beings:
There
is no I as such but only the I of the basic word I-You and the I of the basic
word I-It.
When
a man says I, he means one or the other.
The I he means is present when he says I. And when he says You or It, the I of one or
the other basic word is also present.
The
world as experience belongs to the basic word I-It. The basic word I-You establishes the world of
relation.
The
You encounters me by grace – it cannot be found by seeking. But that I speak the basic word to it is a
basic deed of my whole being, is my essential deed.
The
You encounters me. But I enter into a
direct relationship to it. Thus the
relationship is election and electing, passive and active at once: An action of
the whole being must approach passivity, for it does away with all partial
actions and thus with any sense of action, which always depends on limited
exertions.
The
basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole
being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without
me. I require a You to become; becoming
I, I say You.
All
actual life is encounter.
S. E. Frost, commentating on Buber’s work concludes the following:
Martin
Buber … has expressed the view that man was made less
than human by the encroachments of science and mechanization. … [He] points out the importance of
recognizing one’s own individuality, one’s own uniqueness [and] emphasizes that
the individuals one encounters must be loved and absorbed into one’s own
identity. … [O]nly when there is a harmonious balance
within an individual of an awareness of his own self and an awareness of and
love for the uniqueness of the selves of others can the individual find
fulfilment and contentment
So where does all of this
leave us? I have a few final suggestions
of my own, based on this notion of striving for self-knowledge through caring
and love for our fellow human beings:
§
Don’t compare yourself to others, but
learn from them
§
Be competent, but don’t be
competitive
§
Don’t worry about how you look from
the outside, worry about what you look like on the inside
§
Be generous, you will always receive
more than you give
§
Don’t ever say “I don’t care”
§
Be patient with those who criticise
you, they are seeing their own faults in you
§
Don’t hide your emotions, but do
learn to control them
§
Learn to understand what it means to
love another human being
Thank you. Enjoy your day and make the most of your
lives.
Buber, M. (1996). I and Thou.
Frost, S. E.
(1989). Basic Teachings of the Great
Philosophers.
Gibran, K. (1996). The Prophet. Ware: Wordsworth Editions.
Noddings, N. (2003). Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and
Moral Education, 2nd Ed. Berkeley:
Savater, F. (1997). El Valor de Educar.