This article originally appeared in the fall 2012 Harker Quarterly.
Good morning. I’d like to welcome the board of Trustees, administration, faculty, staff, and the classes of 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013 to today’s matriculation ceremony. Matriculation is a tradition at the Harker upper school during which all freshmen and new students commit themselves, by signature and oath, to the values of honesty and fellowship, among others. You can walk the halls of the campus knowing that all of your classmates have committed themselves to these values.
Mr. Keller and I have the privilege of offering a few words today. Most of the time these brief addresses take the form of an aspiration we have for the student body, something we hope you will keep in mind during the year.
You will be relieved to hear that I am continuing the tradition of confining my aspiration for you to one page of single-space, size 12 font.
Today I want to talk about jam sessions and my hope that you will have many of them this year. What do I mean by jam sessions? They have nothing to do with jelly. On good days, when I have the fortitude, I begin my day with a short run in my neighborhood and a brief meditation on my front balcony. Meditation, it has been said, is an activity done for its own sake. If you are meditating to become a better person or some other purpose then you are not meditating. The philosopher Alan Watts describes meditation as a sort of digging the present moment. Getting with the universe. Perhaps Will Smith would call meditation, “Getting jiggy with it.”
When I meditate I face east, where I am from, and often my thoughts drift to my past. Recently while I was meditating, thoughts of my friends from junior high and high school floated up. I recalled how we used to have what we called “jam sessions,” by which we meant two distinct activities. First, and most obvious, we held musical jam sessions, during which we improvised, or jammed, and played rock songs popular at the time. I played the drums and a little bass guitar while my friends played other instruments. They were all more skillful musicians than I was but none of that mattered at the time. We played music just to play music, to swing with it, to get with the universe.
The second activity, less obvious, was getting together and talking all night, just to talk. We talked about everything: music, authors, teachers, parents, friends, the future, girls and more girls. We talked just to talk, and this, too, was a form of improvisation, a digging the moment.
This is what I hope for you in your high school career, many jam sessions, and not necessarily in the form of music or discussion although those are perfectly fine ways to jam. What I want for you is the spirit of jam sessions, getting lost in an activity for its own sake.
This is the point of most religions, though an often forgotten point. It is also the meaning of music and dance. Alan Watts points out that music and dance are activities done for their own sakes, that music and dance are significant of themselves, not something else. We don’t dance to get to a specific place in the room, nor do we play music to reach the end of the song. The original spirit of religious activity is to put you in touch with the powers of the life so that you understand that those powers are you. That is why people sing in church, to “get with it,” “it” meaning everything. That is a jam session.
I remember chaperoning a sick student on a bus in Washington, D.C. He was sleeping in the back and two local bus drivers were in the front bantering about who was the best prophet in the bible. One bus driver said that Ezekiel was the best prophet there ever was. The two started working themselves up in a religious frenzy, right there. One said he was having a moment. The two didn’t need a church or a preacher. The bus was their church, the spirit of the moment their preacher.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls this “flow,” when the doer and the deed, the actor and the activity are one. My friends and I called them jam sessions. Whatever you call them, I wish for you today that you get lost in some activity for its own sake, without regard to grades, popularity, college admissions or outcomes of any kind. It is hard to do and probably unrealistic to want to be this way all the time. But if you taste it once or more, as many of you have, you will at least get a glimpse of what it is like to not exist, to be one with an activity, a cause, something greater than yourself. If you have a jam session you may find something bigger than yourself to love, or you may find that you yourself are more, way more, than you ever imagined. Thank you.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2012 Harker Quarterly.
Good morning. I would like to welcome members of the board of trustees, the administration, faculty and staff, family, friends, alumni, and the true guests of honor, the graduating Class of 2012. As head of school, I currently hold the privilege of making a few remarks of farewell at graduation. The seniors who paid attention in British Literature will recognize this talk as a “valediction.” In an attempt to “forbid mourning,” I will continue the tradition of confining my remarks to one page of single-spaced, size-12 font.
This is the first graduation address I have ever written on an iPad. That is completely irrelevant to my talk, except that I have pictures of the newest addition to our family, Andreas, on my iPad and also my iPhone. I would show you pictures of Andreas on my iPhone but I cannot get it out of my robe.
The main advantage to writing on an iPad, besides the manipulations it offers to stay within my word count, is that while writing I can take breaks and look at pictures of Andreas, although I almost never do. In fact, I am not confident that my wife and I look at him very much in real life either. Oh, we watch him plenty to make sure he doesn’t eat a golf ball or something like that. But do we see him in the same way he sees us? Which brings me to my advice for you today – “to see like a baby.” I would offer the advice to sleep like a baby, which is only two letters away from seeing like a baby, but my wife and I have been reminded recently that babies do not sleep very well at all. Actually, you should aim to sleep like a toddler, not a baby. Toddlers crash within minutes of hitting the bed and can sleep through a Led Zeppelin concert. But to really see what is around you I advise you to see like a baby.
Albert Einstein wrote, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” If Einstein said this, then it must be true. One of the reasons Einstein made such great discoveries was his ability to see freshly, to see phenomena around him as if for the first time. I think it is very easy to slip into looking at life as if it were not a miracle. To the poet Walt Whitman even a blade of grass was a miracle. He wrote, “I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” He famously misspelled loaf, without the help of the iPad’s spell check, by adding an extra e, but he saw the spear of grass as if it were a miracle. Perhaps it is.
Babies see everything as a miracle. I know that we might say hey, they are new to the world, so yes, everything is amazing to them, including their own fists. But what if they are seeing things the way they are supposed to be seen? What if we, with our overwhelming conviction that most things are ordinary, are the ones who are not truly seeing?
Have you ever noticed how babies look at something? Once their eyes are operational, which takes a while, they truly see. That is why they lose themselves looking at a light fixture, or a fold in a curtain, or a brightly colored, plastic ring. That is why they love faces and peek-a-boo. I have seen Andreas watch his brothers with complete abandon. Of course they almost always were doing something naughty. But when is the last time you looked at a loved one as if he or she were a wonder?
Now this might seem like romantic and impractical advice. But I would argue that truly seeing things as they are is supremely practical. It is critical in research, for example, and for problem solving of any kind. Truly seeing will help you with your relationships at work and with your loved ones. Plus when you see everything as a miracle, like a baby, it is difficult to become bored. A jelly bean can become the center of the universe. Maybe it is.
The big problem, of course, is that babies do not know that they are seeing everything as a miracle – they just see – and most adults do not know that they have lost this ability, or if they do, they do not know how to get it back. The trick is to see like a baby but not try to do it. That is what Yoda meant when he said, “Do or do not. There is no try.” Or the great Zen saying, “In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don’t wobble.” That is why most of the great saints and spiritual leaders of the world admired children. Children at their best are devoid of self-consciousness, like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. But you cannot try not to try either, because that is still trying. “Above all, don’t wobble.”
Mr. Butch Keller, Harker’s upper school head, puts inspirational quotes on the bottom of his emails. He recently had another quote from Einstein in which the great scientist asks, “When was the last time you did anything for the first time?” I don’t believe Einstein just means bungee jumping or feats of that nature. I think he means seeing things as the miracles they are, like a baby. If you see like a baby, you just might see yourself as the miracle you are. Thank you.
This article originally appeared in the fall 2011 Harker Quarterly
Good morning. I’d like to welcome the Board of Trustees, administration, faculty and staff, and the classes of 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012 to the Matriculation Ceremony. For those of you who are new to the school, and some of you who are not new, my name is Christopher Nikoloff, head of school at Harker. I oversee operations on all three campuses, but my office is located on this campus, where I really enjoy getting to know you. Please say hello when we see each other in the hallways, and feel free to stop by my office for cookies anytime. It is better for me if you eat them – otherwise, I will!
I am honored to have the opportunity to open the new academic year with this Matriculation address. Also, I am sure you will be relieved to hear that I am continuing the tradition of brevity, confining my talk to one page of single-spaced, size-twelve font. So far I have received no complaints about this tradition.
As many of you know, this year The Harker School will be up for re-accreditation by its member organizations, the California Association of Independent Schools and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. For those of you who love acronyms, these organizations are known as CAIS and WASC. Joining these organizations creates a pool of professionals who can share resources and promote standards and growth.
Our full six-year term of accreditation expires this year, which is the reason for the re-accreditation. The entire school community participated in a self-study last year, the results of which are shared with the visiting accreditation committee. Some of your fellow students participated in that self-study. My committee, which focused on the school’s mission and philosophy, enjoyed invaluable contributions from two students, for instance. As you know, our mission and philosophy statements emphasize love of learning, kindness, well-roundedness and community. The Matriculation Ceremony today is about committing ourselves to these values.
The accreditation team will take a good look at our mission statement. Some of you may have noticed that this statement is inside every classroom. Please nudge your teacher if his or her classroom is missing one. Tell them that I sent you. One of the critical areas the visiting committee assesses is whether or not we do what we say we do in our mission and philosophy statements. If they grant a full six-year term they are essentially saying three things: we have a sound mission, we do what we say we do in the mission, and we can monitor our own growth as a community.
Our mission and philosophy statements look very much like other independent schools, so we do not anticipate many surprises there. The essence of any school is how it lives up to its mission. Schools are like thumb prints: each different, each special. I believe that we live up to our mission in unique ways. I also believe that the life of our mission is in the often small, unheralded actions that together create the delicate and unmistakable ecosystem we call Harker.
When a student picks up a piece of trash that is not his or holds a door for a stranger, then we are living up to our mission. When students are inspired to help those who are less fortunate, we are living up to our mission. When students choose not to bully or tease, or stand up against bullying or teasing, then our mission is alive and well. When students choose academic integrity, hard work and good cheer, then we are living up to our mission. When students push themselves to learn and grow, then we are reflecting our mission. When students choose cooperation over competition, then we are living our mission. When students tell me that their favorite class is also their most difficult, then I see a sign of our mission.
Accreditation is a lot like the movie ‘The Wizard of Oz.” If you remember the movie, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Lion and Dorothy all look for the Wizard of Oz to find for themselves, respectively, a brain, a heart, courage and a way home. Well, we learn throughout the movie that the Scarecrow has smarts, the Tin Man has heart, the Lion courage and Dorothy a way home all along. None of them need the Wizard for any of these things. Sure, he can give them a piece of paper, but that paper could not bestow on them what they already have. Similarly, if our mission is alive and well, accreditation cannot give us what we already have.
Visitors to the Harker campus usually say that the students are the most impressive, engaging part of their visit. The faculty and staff say that the students are the best part of their day. I believe that is because of the little things you do every day for their own sake, not for some result, that reflect the spirit of our mission statement. The values of love of learning, kindness, well-roundedness and community are alive and well because of the work you, the faculty and staff do each day.
On behalf of the Board of Trustees and the administration, I wish you a great year living up to the spirit of our mission. Thank you.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2011 Harker Quarterly.
Good morning to all our guests: members of the Board of Trustees, administration, faculty and staff, alumni, families, friends, and to our true guests of honor, the graduating class of 2011. I currently hold the privilege of making a few remarks of farewell at graduation. This address is the last requirement standing between you and your diploma. Knowing this, and aware of the fact that you outnumber me, I will continue the tradition of confining my remarks to one page of single-spaced, size twelve font. I will continue to refrain, however, from making any promises about the size of the margins.
In this address I typically try to give one final piece of advice, such as “Dare to singletask” or “Be like Curious George.” By now, you have spent the last 13 years or more of your life cultivating your mind. You have been seeking the right answers to questions, memorizing facts, deepening understanding, mastering processes.
Now that you have reached the milestone of high school graduation largely by cultivating your mind, it may be tempting to think that the mind is central to your success and happiness in the future. And, of course, the mind is very important. Equally important, however, is the ability to go beyond your mind, to “lose your mind,” so to speak. So my advice to you today is, “Dare to lose your mind.”
Of course, I need to immediately qualify this statement. By “lose your mind” I do not mean “go crazy,” though going crazy is called for sometimes, like at football games or family reunions. I also do not mean to sound anti-academic. I am speaking more as a recovering academic. The mind is a terrible thing to waste,
but as a schoolmate of mine used to say, the mind can also be a terrible thing. Of course he used to say that to get out of doing homework. But John Milton, 17th century British poet, agreed. In Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Satan says, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Paradise was lost, remember, when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge.
You too have partaken of the Tree of Knowledge, and you probably have had some late nights of homework when you felt paradise was lost. Knowledge has a way of concealing from us what we do not know. Who really knows what the smallest particle is? Whether or not Pluto is a planet? The great Irish writer Samuel Beckett asked, “Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?” Jiddu Krishnamurti, an Indian educator who is no relation, as far as I know, to our own Gautam, said that “Truth is a pathless land.” He meant that truth is a living thing. Any mental projection onto reality is not truth. The map will never become the terrain.
Perhaps there is another way to say this. It is too bad that accents and emphases do not play as significant a role in English as they do in other languages. As many of you know, words in Mandarin can be spoken in one of four tones, each tone signifying something different. So perhaps I mean to say “Dare to lose your mind,” with the emphasis on “your,” versus “Dare to lose your mind,” with the emphasis on “mind.” By losing your mind, you may more clearly see someone else’s; you may more clearly see the world.
One of my favorite sermons in any religion comes from the Buddha, during which he simply holds up a flower in silence. That was the entire sermon. Apparently only one of his disciples “got it.” The Buddha could tell that this disciple “got it” by the look in his eye. The world exists independent of concepts. A tree doesn’t know that it is a tree – that is our name for it, and it is only a sound coming from our mouths. A tree just is. Krishnamurti – again, not Gautam – often challenged us to look at anything without any image or word, to truly see without the mediation of thought. What is it like to see anything without words or concepts in our head? That is why we all love music, I believe, because it bypasses the head and goes straight to the heart.
Ms. Kelly Espinosa, Harker’s director of summer programs, perhaps known to you as “Ms. Kelly” when you were on the lower school campus, has a profound question sprawled across a wall in her office. The question reads, “What if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about?” This is an astonishing question. If the hokey pokey is really what it is all about, then why do we take ourselves so seriously? Why would we want to get lost in our minds? All we have to do is put our right foot in and take our right foot out, put it back in and shake it all about. That’s life – the cycle of engagement and disengagement. A time to reap and a time to sow.
In closing, the Harker Conservatory put on a fabulous performance of the musical “Pippin” which they will perform at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, this summer. In the musical, Pippin, played by John Ammatuna, also lives too much in his head. He constantly roams the stage looking for the meaning of existence. He finds happiness only when he stops looking for meaning in “LIFE,” all caps, and instead finds meaning in “life,” all lower case, meaning everyday living. His grandmother, played by Allika Walvekar, gives him the advice, “Oh, it’s time to start livin’. Time to take a little from this world we’re given.” (You don’t want me singing that, by the way.) So that is my advice to you today – it is time to start living, and not always from your head. If you dare to lose your mind, you might find something grander, more beautiful and mysterious, and that might just be what has been around you all the time. Thank you.
This article originally appeared in the spring 2011 Harker Quarterly.
Aristotle said that happiness is the highest good. Amy Chua, of “Tiger Mom” fame, said she did it all for her girls’ happiness. It is no fun being mediocre. Activities are more fun when you are really good at them. Life is no fun when you are struggling to succeed. Hard work is the secret to happiness. Or is happiness the secret to hard work?
My Aunt Celia used to say that hard work never killed anyone. She was one of the hardest workers I knew while growing up. She cleaned her house spotless every day. I think she enjoyed it. I am not sure my uncle did.
Bob Milne, top ragtime and boogie woogie artist, played for our upper school students in January. A student asked him how much he practiced. Mr. Milne said he never practiced. He never took a lesson. He taught himself piano by ear.
He used to play for seventeen hours straight in a bar. He plays what he hears in his head without reading music. His playing is masterful.
I am sure Mr. Milne worked hard and probably has a different definition of practice. If you love what you are doing, then it is not practice. Music is supposed to be fun. It should bypass the head and pierce the heart. Audiences listen with their ears, he reminded us. You have to play with your ears open. You have to play with your heart open.
Plants just grow. That’s what they do. But they need good soil, weather and even a stake in the ground sometimes. Young people too may need these things to grow, a good environment and structure. But we can’t do the growing for the plant or the young ones in our care. They have to do it.
Most pursuits at the level of excellence require some kind of technical proficiency, if not mastery. But proficiency without soul is simply mechanical. We have all heard piano recitals that display technical mastery but lack emotional understanding. We have all learned something mechanically but not deeply. I still am unclear how I passed my high school chemistry final. I didn’t understand chemistry.
Yes, we need technical mastery. At some point you just have to practice multiplication tables, musical scales. But, sooner or later, love must enter the picture. Shawn Achor, author of “The Happiness Advantage,” reminds us that happiness creates success, not the other way around.
Musical scales or tennis forehands without love do not lead to happiness. Read Andre Agassi’s autobiography, “Open,” to see what happens when there are hours of forehands without love.
So yes, we need to guide, nurture and occasionally drive a stake into the ground to help our children grow to their fullest potential. But we also have to let our children lead the dance. Do children have to understand hard work and practice? Do they need discipline? Yes, of course. But discipline comes from the Latin “instruction.” You cannot have instruction without love. Any activity without soul, love or deep understanding is not sustainable.
Aristotle said happiness is the only thing we pursue for its own sake, not for anything else. Despite Thomas Jefferson’s claim to our right to the “pursuit of happiness,” most spiritual traditions teach us that happiness cannot be pursued. Aristotle agreed. Happiness happens as a summation of all of the goods. This is not causal, but summative.
I think the same is true of any pursuit of excellence. It cannot be directly pursued, but is more the summation of many ingredients. The most important ingredient is love of the activity itself. Where there is love, excellence may follow, but only after hard work. And like Bob Milne, we may not even consider it work at all.
This article originally appeared in the winter 2010 Harker Quarterly.
There are several national debates rumbling through education today. We are on a “race to nowhere” or other nations will take over the world if our children do not practice more math problems. We need to hold teachers accountable or we need to hold students accountable. We need more school choice or schools of choice need more oversight.
Education is prone to fads, the swoosh of mighty pendulum swings. Because education is in some ways about achieving balance, what Neil Postman called a thermostatic function, debates will always be a part of education. I think some of the current national dialogue on education stems from frustration with some of the built-in blind spots that schools necessarily have. Here are a few.
One, as schools are future-oriented, they miss the present. The entire purpose of schooling is suffused with future. For almost two decades, we sit in classrooms and prepare for the future.
We learn things because we might need them in the future.
I think this is behind some of the angst of the “race to nowhere” movement. Parents sense they are raising a generation of children who are missing out on their present as they prepare for the future. As Eckhart Tolle points out in “The Power of Now,” the future never arrives. It is always Now. Parents recall their childhoods, and they don’t remember missing the present as much.
Two, schools are systems designed to deliver knowledge. Knowledge is wonderful. I love learning. This is what schools are supposed to do, and we cannot fault them for doing so. But knowledge is not wisdom, and sometimes it isn’t even obviously useful. The American education system has a deep suspicion of academic content, following a long tradition of progressive theory going back to Rousseau and Dewey.
Again, this may be behind some of today’s increasing calls for less homework, less breadth and more depth. We all shudder at the thought of youngsters memorizing stuff to pass a test only to forget it and reload for the next test.
Finally, schools teach us to judge. We evaluate and measure everything in schools, even ourselves. We compare ourselves to others. We compare ourselves to ourselves from a different time. Judging is important in life. We sometimes have to judge ourselves or others to grow.
But judging, especially when the metric is quantitative, withers the soul. How do you measure curiosity? Kindness? Insight? A wrong but thoughtful answer? All parents wants their children to do well on the SAT, but no parent wants a child defined by a multiple-choice test.
Most religions attempt to counter these very blind spots that schools propagate: live in the present, see things as they are, do not judge. Children are naturally good at this. William Wordsworth famously captured children’s natural ability to see the beauty of the world and to live in the present:
THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” lines 1-5
Ironically, most religious traditions attempt to get us to be more childlike (not childish) in our approach to the world, what Zen calls “beginner’s mind.” Children enter schools to learn from adults, but adults would do well to learn from children and not to undo what children already do well.
The “Tao Te Ching” says, “When you have institutions, know where their functions should end.” Schools are wonderful places. But like all institutions, they have blind spots. We cannot fault them for not doing what they are not designed to do. But we can be aware of their limitations and mitigate them as best we can.
We cannot become children again, but we can, as T.S. Eliot describes in his “Four Quartets,” “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Sometimes if we are lucky, the most magical education will help us to see something as if for the first time. Sometimes if we are very lucky, that something will not only be the world, but ourselves, too.
This article originally appeared in the fall 2010 Harker Quarterly.
Good morning. I’d like to welcome the Board of Trustees, administration, faculty and staff, and the classes of 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 to the Matriculation ceremony. I am honored to have the opportunity to open the new academic year with this Matriculation address, and I am sure you will be relieved to hear that I am continuing the tradition of brevity. Typically I deliver a two-page address at Matriculation; this year I am cutting back to one page of single spaced, size 12 font. At this rate, by the time I retire, I will be delivering one-word addresses, like “love” or “cheesecake.”
I would like to reflect upon the fact that an important group is not present today. The tradition of not inviting parents to Matriculation goes back to the founding of The Harker Upper School over a decade ago. When the school conceived of a Matriculation ceremony, during which the student body binds itself to common values by oath, parents were purposely left out. First, we didn’t have room for them. But secondly, I believe, we wanted you to commit to these values freely, and we wanted your commitment to wholly represent your will and no one else’s.
Now I know that some of you, perhaps many of you, most likely do not feel that you are here freely, but the truth is you are. Each and every one of you has the freedom not to participate. Yes, there would be consequences. We all can imagine Mr. Williamson chasing you over fences and across highways. But the presence of a consequence does not mean that you are not free to act. You are also free not to participate with your heart. Many of our greatest thinkers like Thoreau, Gandhi and King purposely broke laws and by doing so incurred severe consequences to highlight the immorality of the laws. They called this civil disobedience.
However, as excruciating as it is to listen to me, I hope that doing so does not call for civil disobedience. Now that we have established that you have free will, and that you can exercise that will even if the exercise thereof brings consequences, why do we care? I would argue that having free will is an exclusively human attribute. It separates us from the animals. Sure, there are glimpses of free will in the animal kingdom – an eagle choosing to soar above the mountaintops for instance – but most of the time animals respond to instinct.
Humans respond to instinct too, probably much more than we’d like to admit. But we don’t have to. Last year I spoke from this podium about academic integrity. I received some criticism, mostly deserved, for beginning the year on a sour note. But I learned through discussions with students, teachers and administrators that the community did not want to be defined by the poor decisions of a few. Last year saw, among other accomplishments, Paul Melendez of the University of Arizona’s High School Ethics Forum extend an invitation for that event to Harker students, the only out-of-state invitees at the forum. We are also proud to announce that the Council for Spiritual and Ethical Education will hold a conference at The Harker School in February of 2011 titled “Honor Codes and Councils: From Nuts and Bolts to a Finely-Tuned System.”
These achievements do not mean that we have solved the problem of cheating in schools. Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon, said, “Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin.” We could say the same of high level academics and some form of cheating. But this is not to be complacent, and you as a community have chosen action over complacence.
I remember specifically one young lady telling me that students want to be informed of any problem in the community so that they can address it directly. She said that the students care about the community and want to protect it.
Which brings me back to free will and the absence of parents. You are taking an oath today, hopefully of your own accord, to bind yourself to the values of this community. You will carry that oath around with you in the upper school student handbook and planner, or at least two or three of you will. Your signature will be on display at the front of the upper school office. You will have many assignments in your academic career that you simply want to finish. I hope that taking this oath is not one of them.
One of my favorite stories comes from Arthurian legend as interpreted by the mythologist Joseph Campbell. The knights are charged with finding the Holy Grail, which symbolizes spiritual wealth, in the forests surrounding Camelot. The knights learn that they cannot find the Grail as a group; rather, each knight has to enter the woods alone where there is no path and find the Grail for himself. My father-in-law reminds me that as a parent I can do many things for my children, but I cannot live in their shoes. We are taking the oath today as a group, but each of you is beginning a journey that is uniquely of your making. You will enter the woods alone, without parents, friends, teachers, and we hope that you are taking this journey of your own free will. It is by following your path alone that you find the entire world. Thank you.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2010 Harker Quarterly.
Good morning to all our esteemed guests: members of the board of trustees, administration, faculty and staff, alumni, families, friends, and to our true guests of honor, the graduating class of 2010. I currently hold the privilege of making a few remarks of farewell at graduation. This address is the last requirement standing between you and your diploma. Knowing this, and aware of the fact that you outnumber me, I will continue the tradition of confining my remarks to one page of single-spaced, size twelve font. I will continue to refrain, however, from making any promises about the size of the margins.
In this address, I typically try to give one final piece of advice, such as, “Dare to be wrong” or, “Be like Curious George.” Today I want to take advantage of the fact that we are wholly focused on one thing, your graduation. That focus is nice, isn’t it? Together we can feel the wind, see this commanding view, contemplate the future, and maybe even listen to our own thoughts. Today we are one consciousness delicately caught in that timeless space between past and future. Sounds deep, doesn’t it?
Today and in the future, you will have more and more claims made on your attention, and I am sure you will be asked to multitask. We all have unquestioning faith in this wonderful skill, multitasking, and we are often told that we need to multitask to succeed in the workplace. But I want to counter that the world does not need more multitaskers. We need more singletaskers, people who think deeply and slowly about one thing. The world needs, I believe, people who can, like Einstein, devote three-and-a-half years to a single problem, such as why light behaves like both a particle and a wave. So my advice to you today is, “Dare to singletask.”
Now I know that “Dare to singletask” isn’t very catchy. Multitasking sounds much cooler. Who wants to singletask? According to Microsoft Word, it’s not even a word. (Multitask is, by the way.) I considered using the word “monotask,” which at least has the benefit of beginning with an “m,” like its counterpart “multitask.” But I like “singletask” because of its conjuring of “singlemindedness.” Besides, monotask sounds like something you do when you have mononucleosis, or runs the risk of sounding monotonous. Singletask sounds like you are doing it on purpose.
And purpose is the purpose. Pascal said, “All of man’s trouble stems from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I am asking you to do just that. Sit in a room alone. Since most of you will have college roommates whom you cannot eject, find any place that will do. A library corner, or the woods. Just be alone with your thoughts. Do one thing deeply and well. Struggle with a very difficult book for months. Stare at a flower. Think about the purpose of life.
This is not an anti-technology rant. I love technology as much as the next person. I have an iPhone and a Kindle. I don’t Twitter, but I think I know what it means. If my wife allows me, I might even get an iPad. Rather, I am just calling for more horsepower where we need it – deep, analytical thinking about one important topic. The inscription at the entrance of the Oracle at Delphi was “Know thyself.” Greeks visited Delphi to find answers, but the answer they received was to look within.
Besides, you may not be as good at multitasking as you believe. Research by Clifford Nass at Stanford University shows that chronic multitaskers who think they are good at doing many things at the same time actually perform poorly at multitasking. He says that most of what we know about psychology suggests that the brain is not very good at multitasking, yet we are called to do it more and more.
So when your future boss or professor asks you to do two or three things by next Wednesday, do them well by next Tuesday. Do not say, “Excuse me, but my head of school advised me not to multitask at graduation.”
This article originally appeared in the winter 2009 Harker Quarterly.
Just recently on campus, I saw a couple of students casually talking with a teacher, a common scene, especially around lunchtime and after school. They concluded their brief chat with a gentle, playful knuckle crack. Was this the new handshake in this post-H1N1 world, presumably because viruses have more difficulty jumping from knuckle to knuckle than from palm to palm? Perhaps the students taught the teacher the new handshake to assist him in being more cool.
This easy, respectful exchange is one of hundreds of such exchanges that happen between teachers, staff, coaches and students daily within a learning community. Ever since Socrates debated with his students in the Agora, educators have touted the benefits of real dialogue with live human beings within proximity of each other as optimal for stimulating thought.
After a recent town meeting with upper school students, I had a student approach me privately to tell me that he benefits more in classes that have dialogue, where students are placed in a circle of desks or around the table, all facing each other. He felt that no student can hide in this arrangement, that the class worked more as a community and the dialogue pushed everyone towards better thinking. He added that when students face each other and talk about concepts, everyone becomes responsible for the learning and the discussion.
The Digital Age, however, is upending all traditional assumptions about what shape education ought to take in the future. What should schooling look like in an age where I can download all of the works of Proust on my iPhone for free? It was not too long ago that most of humanity considered owning a book a luxury. Giving lectures in the Middle Ages meant reading from a book because the lecturers, usually priests, were the only ones who owned books. Lecture comes from the Latin “legere,” meaning “to read.”
I also have downloaded most of the main texts of the seven major religions on my iPhone for free. I read from them while I am waiting for my wife in the car. There was a time when few families could afford to own the Holy Bible or even read from it. I think of the millennia of wisdom distilled into those texts compared with the ten seconds or so it takes for me to acquire them. People have lived and died by these holy texts, and I zap them into my phone while in the checkout line.
We are all struggling to envision the school of the future, or the shape that common schooling will take for most students in the future. Right now, the educational landscape seems to be fragmenting, not converging. There are more choices of structure than ever: public, private, charter, online, homeschooling and all variations in between. No one structure seems to have a claim on the future – perhaps no one structure ever will.
Proponents of online schools and homeschooling understand that students still need proms and band practice. Brick-and-mortar schools cannot fail to capitalize on the pedagogical applications of YouTube (yes, there are
plenty). Educators and parents are acutely aware of the more competitive world young people are inheriting. As Tom Friedman, author of “The World is Flat” and other bestsellers, is fond of saying, “It used to be better to be a B+ student from Brooklyn than an A student from Bangalore.” Not anymore. Anyone can compete from anywhere.
Some businesses are working under a new paradigm called “clicks-and-mortar.” Schools are doing the same. Throughout history, we developed large libraries and cultivated educated teachers and professors who slowly meted out access to knowledge through coursework and circulation desks. Now those clicks in the “clicks and mortar” model have bypassed all access controls. Learning is asynchronous, not synchronous. Students and teachers do not have to be in the same room at the same time to conduct schooling. More radically, some believe that we do not need teachers – all of the world’s knowledge exists in the “cloud.”
We have been here before. Diderot’s effort to compile huge swaths of knowledge in the “Encyclopédie,” some 35 volumes in length, typifies the Enlightenment Age’s impulse to categorize knowledge in accessible ways. It was believed that the chalkboard, film strip, radio and television would revolutionize classrooms. So far, the chalkboard has had the biggest claim to fame in that regard.
Neil Postman, author of “Amusing Ourselves to Death” and other books on education, reminds us that the invention of the printing press made traditional schooling more necessary, not less. The unprecedented access to knowledge the printing press inaugurated made it necessary to control and organize the flow of information to youngsters in age- and developmentally-appropriate ways. Traditional schooling was not made obsolete by the printing press; rather, it was made more necessary because of the deluge of information the printing press poured over the masses.
Do we have a similar condition with the Internet? Does the Internet, with its even greater and easier access to information than the printing press, make background knowledge and context that much more necessary? I will never forget a faculty meeting during which teachers were discussing the importance of content knowledge in the learning process. John Near, a beloved 31-year history teacher who recently passed away, said something extraordinary. All of his best researchers, he said, were also his most knowledgeable history students. He did not mean that they became knowledgeable history students through good research. He meant that they knew how to research, whether online or traditionally, because they already knew so much about history.
The Internet is a wonderful tool. I had to pop online several times while writing this article to confirm facts. Was it Diderot who was hired to edit the “Encyclopédie”? I could confirm this fact more quickly on the Internet than anywhere else. But I had somehow to remember Diderot’s association with the “Encyclopédie” during the Enlightenment to have a fact to confirm in the first place.
What will schools look like in the future? None of us can be sure, and there are many models up for grabs. I hope that whatever model or models hold, there is room for human exchanges and extreme care around the context of knowledge that is shared. I don’t think we can take the humans out of what is essentially a human activity. An “educated” baseball glove has all of the warmth, texture and character of the human hand that wore it for countless games and practices. Socrates may or may not have knuckle-cracked with his students, but he did touch their minds, and ours, forever.