what according to the speaker is the significance of the robes the graduates are wearing
Here's a new 1 in the annals of first speakers: A teacher at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts gave his address to the Class of 2012 and blasted the students, telling them over and over, "You're not special."
(Dennis R.J. Geppert/AP)
Information technology was all said in the context of telling students that at that place is a big wide world out there and that they should not succumb to a culture in which everyone gets a trophy. McCullough, son of the honor-winning historian David McCullough Sr., brash the students to seize the future past doing what they love, rather than taking a job for money.
"Climb the mountain not to constitute your flag, just to comprehend the claiming, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it then you can see the world, not so the world can see you," he said near the end of the speech.
But he wasn't exactly kind in getting to his message.
"Contrary to what your soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent imperial dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to salve you lot… y'all're nothing special," he said.
Hither'due south the text of the speech from The Swellesley Report:
Dr. Wong, Dr. Keough, Mrs. Novogroski, Ms. Curran, members of the board of education, family and friends of the graduates, ladies and gentlemen of the Wellesley High School class of 2012, for the privilege of speaking to you this afternoon, I am honored and grateful. Thank you.
So here we are… start… life's great forward-looking ceremony. (And don't say, "What about weddings?" Weddings are one-sided and insufficiently effective. Weddings are bride-centric pageantry. Other than conceding to a list of unreasonable demands, the groom merely stands there. No stately, hey-everybody-look-at-me procession. No being given away. No identity-changing pronouncement. And can yous imagine a tv set prove dedicated to watching guys try on tuxedos? Their fathers sitting there misty-eyed with joy and disbelief, their brothers lurking in the corner muttering with green-eyed. Left to men, weddings would be, after limits-testing procrastination, spontaneous, almost inadvertent… during halftime… on the way to the refrigerator. And then there's the frequency of failure: Statistics tell u.s. half of yous will get divorced. A winning percentage like that'll get y'all last identify in the American League East. The Baltimore Orioles do ameliorate than weddings.)
But this ceremony… showtime… a commencement works every time. From this twenty-four hours forward… truly… in sickness and in health, through financial fiascos, through midlife crises and acceptably attractive sales reps at trade shows in Cincinnati, through diminishing tolerance for annoyingness, through every difference, irreconcilable and otherwise, y'all volition stay forever graduated from high school, you lot and your diploma every bit ane, 'til death do you part.
No, commencement is life's dandy formalism get-go, with its ain attendant and highly advisable symbolism. Fitting, for example, for this cheering rite of passage, is where we discover ourselves this afternoon, the venue. Normally, I avoid clichés like the plague, wouldn't bear on them with a x-foot pole, but here we are on a literal level playing field. That matters. That says something. And your ceremonial costume… shapeless, uniform, 1-size-fits-all. Whether male or female, tall or curt, scholar or slacker, spray-tanned prom queen or intergalactic X-Box assassinator, each of y'all is dressed, you'll notice, exactly the aforementioned. And your diploma… merely for your name, exactly the aforementioned.
All of this is as it should be, because none of you is special.
Yous are not special. Yous are not exceptional.
Opposite to what your soccer trophy suggests, your glowing 7th grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to salvage you… y'all're nothing special.
Yeah, yous've been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, chimera-wrapped. Yep, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed yous, fed you lot, wiped your oral fissure, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught yous, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you lot, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged yous once more. You've been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored. Y'all've been feted and fawned over and chosen sweetie pie. Aye, yous have. And, certainly, we've been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs. Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with please at your every tweet. Why, maybe you've even had your film in the Townsman! And at present you lot've conquered high schoolhouse… and, indisputably, here nosotros all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building…
But practise non get the idea you're anything special. Considering you're not.
The empirical prove is everywhere, numbers fifty-fifty an English teacher can't ignore. Newton, Natick, Nee… I am allowed to say Needham, yes? …that has to be two thou high school graduates right there, give or take, and that's only the neighborhood Ns. Beyond the country no fewer than 3.2 million seniors are graduating about now from more 37,000 high schools. That'south 37,000 valedictorians… 37,000 class presidents… 92,000 harmonizing altos… 340,000 swaggering jocks… 2,185,967 pairs of Uggs. Merely why limit ourselves to high schoolhouse? After all, you're leaving it. So retrieve virtually this: even if yous're one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nigh vii,000 people just like you. Imagine standing somewhere over there on Washington Street on Marathon Monday and watching sixty-viii hundred yous go running by. And consider for a moment the bigger picture: your planet, I'll remind yous, is not the heart of its solar system, your solar organisation is non the center of its galaxy, your galaxy is non the centre of the universe. In fact, astrophysicists clinch us the universe has no center; therefore, you lot cannot exist it. Neither tin can Donald Trump… which someone should tell him… although that hair is quite a phenomenon.
"But, Dave," y'all weep, "Walt Whitman tells me I'm my own version of perfection! Epictetus tells me I have the spark of Zeus!" And I don't disagree. So that makes half dozen.8 billion examples of perfection, 6.8 billion sparks of Zeus. You come across, if everyone is special, and then no one is. If anybody gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken just non and so subtle Darwinian competition with i some other — which springs, I retrieve, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we accept of belatedly, we Americans, to our detriment, come to beloved accolades more than than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the indicate — and we're happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that'due south the quickest mode, or only style, to accept something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is information technology how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you lot win or lose, or learn or grow, or savor yourself doing it… At present it'due south "Then what does this get me?"
As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and edifice a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans. It's an epidemic — and in its way, not even dear old Wellesley Loftier is immune… one of the best of the 37,000 nationwide, Wellesley High Schoolhouse… where practiced is no longer practiced enough, where a B is the new C, and the midlevel curriculum is called Avant-garde College Placement. And I promise you lot caught me when I said "one of the best." I said "one of the best" and so we can feel better nigh ourselves, and then nosotros can enjoy in a little easy distinction, nonetheless vague and unverifiable, and count ourselves amidst the elite, whoever they might be, and enjoy a perceived leg upwardly on the perceived competition. But the phrase defies logic. By definition at that place tin can be just ane best. You're it or yous're non.
If you've learned annihilation in your years here I hope information technology's that didactics should be for, rather than material advantage, the exhilaration of learning. You lot've learned, likewise, I hope, as Sophocles bodacious us, that wisdom is the chief element of happiness. (Second is ice foam… just an fyi) I also hope you lot've learned enough to recognize how little you know… how little you know now… at the moment… for today is just the start. It's where yous go from here that matters.
Equally y'all commence, then, and before yous scatter to the winds, I urge you to practice whatever you do for no reason other than you love it and believe in its importance. Don't bother with work you don't believe in whatsoever more than than you would a spouse y'all're not crazy about, lest you too find yourself on the wrong side of a Baltimore Orioles comparing. Resist the piece of cake comforts of self-approbation, the specious glitter of materialism, the narcotic paralysis of self-satisfaction. Be worthy of your advantages. And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life. Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to utilize it. Dream big. Piece of work hard. Think for yourself. Honey everything y'all love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, delight, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from fewer and fewer; and equally surely equally in that location are commencements in that location are cessations, and y'all'll be in no condition to enjoy the anniversary bellboy to that eventuality no affair how delightful the afternoon.
The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life, is an achievement, not something that will fall into your lap considering you're a nice person or mommy ordered it from the caterer. Yous'll note the founding fathers took pains to secure your inalienable right to life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness–quite an active verb, "pursuit"–which leaves, I should retrieve, little time for lying around watching parrots rollerskate on YouTube. The start President Roosevelt, the erstwhile rough passenger, advocated the strenuous life. Mr. Thoreau wanted to drive life into a corner, to live deep and suck out all the marrow. The poet Mary Oliver tells us to row, row into the swirl and roil. Locally, someone… I forget who… from time to time encourages young scholars to carpe the heck out of the diem. The indicate is the same: become busy, have at it. Don't look for inspiration or passion to detect you. Get up, get out, explore, discover it yourself, and grab hold with both hands. (Now, before you dash off and get your YOLO tattoo, allow me betoken out the illogic of that trendy little expression–because you can and should live not merely once, but every day of your life. Rather than You Only Live Once, it should be You lot Live Simply In one case… but because YLOO doesn't accept the same ring, we shrug and decide it doesn't matter.)
None of this solar day-seizing, though, this YLOOing, should exist interpreted equally license for self-indulgence. Like accolades ought to exist, the fulfilled life is a event, a gratifying byproduct. Information technology's what happens when you're thinking nearly more important things. Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, simply to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can run into the globe, not so the world tin meet you. Become to Paris to be in Paris, not to cantankerous information technology off your list and congratulate yourself for beingness worldly. Exercise free will and creative, contained thought non for the satisfactions they will bring yous, but for the proficient they will exercise others, the rest of the 6.8 billion–and those who will follow them. And then y'all as well will discover the great and curious truth of the man experience is that selflessness is the best thing you lot can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come merely with the recognition that you're not special.
Considering everyone is.
Congratulations. Proficient luck. Make for yourselves, please, for your sake and for ours, extraordinary lives.
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