Welcome graduates, parents, community members, and other
esteemed guests. I’d like to thank
you for attending our graduation tonight; an event I hope you agree is
different than most graduations, in a good way.
Most graduation speeches are filled with advice to the
graduates about a wide variety of things, from taking risks to wearing
sunscreen. There are a few
graduation speeches that are policy speeches like the one President Barack
Obama gave to West Point last week, and this speech will be one of those.
Human culture is filled with rites of passages. From graduation to bar mitzvahs,
quinceaneras to Lion hunting, passages from childhood to adulthood are common
throughout the world. Today’s
event marks an academic passage from one location of learning to another and by
no means is an event marking a coming of age. In fact, I believe that there is no such single event that
marks that passage but instead it is the slow development of character over
time that takes a person from an adolescent to an adult.
It is the development of character over time that I wish to
take a few minutes and expound upon today. Character education is the process of intentionally creating
opportunities to talk about and reflect upon outcomes from moral or ethical
situations. The primary way that
we create these opportunities is through a class we have called Crew. Crew is a class like other schools have
called advisory or homeroom, but instead of a class whose primary purpose is
announcements or administrative tasks, we take the time intentionally build a
school culture where people build empathy and discuss our lives to grow
together. In Crew we’ve talked
about racism, our weekends, sexism, “no means no”, we’ve taken care of fake
babies, reading to them and bathing them, played kickball, created baskets for
PTO fund raisers, planned dances, studied inspiring lives like Nelson Mandela,
done Anti-bullying lessons, learned about time management, fed starving
children, and the list goes on.
The term Crew is an Expeditionary Learning term that comes
from being on a ship together. The
father of Expeditionary Learning, Kurt Hahn, believed very strongly in the role
that challenges could play in building culture, character, and leadership and
often times his challenges took the form of sailing on the open ocean. He is credited with the quotation “nobody
is allowed to be a passenger, everyone belongs to the ship’s crew” which places
on the students a burden of being involved in the development of themselves and
each other. It also places upon
all of us the onus of assisting in the development of their character, not
allowing any of us to be passengers in the lives of those in front of us or
around us.
Think about the consequences of this for a moment. Everyone here is a part of these
graduates’ lives in some way or another, making you Crew on their ship. Until now, they have all been Crew on
the same ship. By transitivity we
have been bound together to help each other develop a positive school culture
and the character of these graduates.
How you have done that, only you know. The degree to which you have been an asset to OWL only you
know and only you are going to judge.
Another way we at OWL work to build character is by taking
the time to discuss issues that arise in our classes that some feel may take
away from academic learning time.
At OWL we use words like Integrity, Perseverance, Responsibility,
Collaboration and Stewardship but others use words like Grit, Optimism,
Compassion, Respect, and so on. By
intentionally building these into our curriculum, and even putting a grade to
them, we are saying that we value these character traits and their development
are just as important as academic development. And I want to emphasize that when I say development I mean
that these are things that people can, and do, get better at. Just as students get better at
mathematics in my classroom as the result of time, effort, and reflection,
students can get better at stewardship by not littering, telling their friends
to not litter, and by taking time to give back of their talents or treasures to
the community. People can, and do,
get better all the time.
That brings us back to my original point about passage from
adolescence into adulthood. A
moment ago I mentioned responsibility, and one of the primary ways that people
are judged as adults is how they manage their responsibilities. Those responsibilities are many and
include things like voting, taking care of dependants, following through on
commitments, et cetera. Many of
the graduates on this stage have been, by this definition, adults for a
while. Some of the graduates on
this stage will not be adults for some time yet to come. How they develop from this moment
forward is in part the responsibility of those of us here to support them as
members as their Crews.
My challenge to the graduates on stage is to think about
what role you would OWL to serve for you moving forward. I see three potential
possibilities. The first is that
you see yourself well on your way as a balanced individual and adult and want
to give back to OWL in ways that are specific to your abilities. The second is where you still need help
from us and we are here to assist you in any way that we can. Admitting to this second by the way is
not an admission of weakness, but of strength. It is a statement that you are nearly there and just need a
little bit more and we are here to help.
The third is that you are ready to leave us and never look back. As teachers I can tell you that while
sometimes sad, this is okay too.
You see, teachers don’t make widgets, we help make people. As you leave us each of us is force to
reflect on the type of people we have helped you become and hopefully that
reflection enables us to help create even better people to follow.
So celebrate today, understand this event in its context,
continue to grow as a person we can all be proud of so that if you were to have
a bumper sticker or a shirt in the community we could see you acting like a
person we are happy to have advertising for us.
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