I liked Erica Goldson’s graduation speech very much partly because she says the same things I say here. To me, the core of her message is that her high school was
a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us
That’s what I tried to say here. Goldson summed it up better than I did. One of the things that pushed me toward that conclusion happened in an undergraduate seminar about depression that I taught at Berkeley. For a final project, the students could do almost anything related to depression, so long as it was off campus and did not involve library research. One student chose to give a talk to a high school class. Not a rare choice — several other students did the same thing. But her final paper blew me away. She wrote about how hard it had been. She had/has severe stage fright. Every step of the project was very hard for her. But she did it. “I learned I can conquer my fears,” she wrote.
Her performance on the week-to-week assignments (writing comments on the reading) had been mediocre. But now I saw another side of her: She was courageous. My assignments, like practically all college assignments, required no courage. So I never noticed how courageous any of my students were. I remember sitting at my desk after reading her paper and thinking how badly I had undervalued her. I had noticed this only because I’d given a highly unusual assignment. I could see that there was a gigantic amount of undervaluing going on. And undervaluation leads to suppression. Students have unique or unusual strengths that fail to develop because their high school or college teachers don’t value them.
Thanks to Tucker Max.
Erica’s speech is interesting, but I think she considerably overstates her case. There has to be some kind of middle ground between the strict regimentation that happens now and the more free-wheeling system that Erica seems to favor.
In way Cormack McCarthy’s The Road is one of the best statements on learning: the two protagonists are shown constantly learning; constantly attuned to each other and to their environment. With no room for anything redundant, no directives from outside, and an ever-present real-world survival context that naturally brings about full engagement, there’s not really the same kind of division between what one ought to do and what one wants to do – one wants to survive and the reasons for learning are never abstract or received on faith.
The way we can move towards this ‘natural engagement’ in civilised life is to encourage intellectual curiosity (inherently rewarding when things cohere and work) and to reward origination, intellectual integrity, virtue in general. This could all be done culturally, without any government flagship programme, though things being as they are the government would probably have to play some kind of part, even if only to clear the way for such developments, i.e. alternative schools.
Oops: “e.g. alternative schools”
Also, we keep forgetting that many if not most famous achievers were/are weirdos in one way or another – to become even a minor talent/knowledge outlier probably involves some form of eccentricity? School life does not generally have much tolerance for eccentricity.
Even athletes – and I think many of them are quite boring, hyperfocused people – there’s a certain Olympic gold-winning British athlete; I got talking to a psychologist one time who told me that she had treated her for OCD and that her training was a productive ‘outlet’.
She made a few good points, but after I’d been reading for a while, I realized they weren’t her own ideas. She’s obviously the pet of the charismatic, leftist teacher she mentioned. Too bad the teacher shamed an accomplished student into denigrating her own accomplishments in order to further the teacher’s agenda of preferring creativity to academics. Maybe the valedictorian wanted to do exactly what she did. Maybe she’s good at learning academic subjects, instead of changing the world or whatever Teacher wanted her to do.
Again, I partly agree with her speech, but it’s obvious that there’s some personal stuff going on here. It’s not clean. Hopefully, when Erica goes to college, she’ll find other teachers who appreciate what she’s good at–academics–and forget the creepy teacher she’s trying to impress.
My brother just sent me a video of the speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwRTTp19Xnk&playnext=1&videos=x0ZSkIPazRo&feature=sub
Alex Chernavsky and latte island — I very much agree. However, I really liked where Seth took the observation and the starting point. Sometimes it is very much a mix.
The ironic thing is that the “secretive government agencies” actually value critical thinking a great deal.
Isn’t that what schools are for? Demoralizing kids and filling them with “knowledge” of the suppressor’s liking?
That’s how I understand public school as of today.
Be well.
When someone in the same speech speaks out against compulsory government mandated education AND quotes Mencken to then assume that person is the pet of a charismatic, leftist teacher?
With all due respect, I think it would be worth the time to read up on just who is Mencken, how incredible it is that this 18-year-old is quoting him!, and examine just who among the left and/or right supports compulsory education and who does not.
It is possible in the same speech to string ideas from various people’s philosophies with whom you don’t 100% agree on everything. I simply don’t find any political idealogical dogma in this student’s speech for the left or right… I think the whole point of the talk both regarding schooling and thought is to not standardize and pigeonhole other people.
If she is a leftist, it’s strange that someone from the “right” is speaking out against her because she’s speaking out against compulsory standardized education? What an interesting non-traditional position for someone from the right to take!
And she uses the word “Corporatism”! Holy moly! No leftist I know (and very few “rightests”) even knows what that word means. Kudos to her again for using it.
To be against corporatism by the way is not to be against capitalism… unless you approve of the government bailouts carried out by both the current and previous administrations… that’s not capitalism folks, that’s corporatism and that’s going down the road further and further away from a free market and toward socialism. We may thank both the left and right politicians for that.