The schooling of our 92 Grade 12 students came to a celebratory conclusion yesterday morning when we held our graduation ceremony, or as it is peculiarly known here in the US, “Commencement Exercises”.
Our special guest was Ms Niloufar Molavi, a former Awty student who is now US Vice Chair, US Energy Leader and Managing Partner for Greater Houston for Price Waterhouse Coopers.
After the
ceremony, I lost count of the number of people who asked for a copy of my speech, and so in response to those requests and the very complimentary comments that accompanied them, I have reproduced my speech below. As several parents remarked with smiles on their faces over morning tea following the ceremony, this is probably the first time that Kim Il Sung has been quoted in a graduation speech in an American high school:
Our distinguished guest, Ms Niloufar Molavi,
Chairman of the Awty International School board, Mr Mark Schroeder,
Members of the Board, parents, guests, faculty and staff, and young men and women, soon-to-be-graduates of the Awty International School,
Much as I love computers, laptops and iPads, I love books even more. As my wife will testify, usually at great length and in considerable detail, I am addicted to books and I have (so she claims) far too many of them. I cannot visit a new city or country without taking the time to browse the bookstores, and I have my regular favourites in places as diverse as London, Sydney, Singapore, Hong Kong, Rangoon,
Delhi – the list of “my” bookstores goes on.
In my favourite book store in Pyongyang, North Korea, there is a large sign with a quote by Kim Il Sung: “The book is a silent teacher and a companion in life. Young people should carry books with them at all times and read various good books zealously”. That is good advice – you are young people, and I hope you carry good books with you and I hope you read them zealously.
For some reason, which I am guessing might be to sell more books, book store owners seem to like displaying large signs in their shops. Earlier this year, while I was visiting a book shop in Philadelphia, a new one for me, I looked up from the shelves to see a large sign on the wall which read “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself”.
As I said, that sign
was no doubt designed to encourage customers to buy books, and I found it compelling and provocative. If we believe the self-help channels on television, we can easily assume that that all we need to do to discover ourselves is look deeply enough within us. This ego-centricity limits our sense of enquiry and it runs the risk of diminishing our willingness to engage with other people who hold contrary opinions. Books, and talking with people we disagree with, are both important reality checks for us all.
We need to recognise that outside the orbit of our own lives lie riches that are far beyond our imagination. What the unknown author of the sign was suggesting is that we need to venture outside ourselves and journey into the mottled world of good and bad. And to our graduating students here this morning, I would say this – I hope that your education at Awty has been precisely that – a
journey beyond yourself into the mottled world of good and bad, engaging with new ideas that I hope have expanded your perspective and taken you outside your comfort zone.
As I have often said to my ToK students, “if you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish”. In the same way, I say that I hope you have seen and experienced both bad and good here at Awty, because unless you have experienced some of the bad, you have no basis to appreciate, or even recognise (for that matter), the good – and even more importantly, the excellent – when you encounter it. You need that external frame of reference as your
reality check.
Well, the sign in the book shop worked. I bought a book. It was a biography of Nelson Mandela. I am not trying to name drop here, but Nelson Mandela was my (titular) boss when I was working in Hong Kong before I moved to Houston. He is now 94 years old, and from what I hear, he may not be with us for much longer. Reading his
biography, I came to an even deeper understanding of something that I already knew – Nelson Mandela provides us all with an extraordinary example of the truth of that sign in the book store in Philadelphia – life is all about creating yourself.
There’s no doubt that luck exists, but success through luck does not exist. We’ve all heard of the story about how Isaac Newton discovered gravity after an apple struck his head when he was resting under a tree. But is the story as simple as that? An apple might have indeed fallen on his head, but the apple
was not solely responsible for Newton’s conception of his second law of motion. Without imagination, he would not have pondered why the apple fell down instead of up; without knowledge in Physics, he would not have been able to link this to acceleration; without hard work, he would not have been able to utilise the findings of Galileo and other great scientists to come up with the concept of the gravitational force that keeps the moon in orbit around the earth.
Luck can open unexpected
doors. Luck can even provide the opportunity of coming to Awty, an opportunity that (as I articulated at the graduation dinner last night) very, very few people can and will ever experience. But luck is neither necessary nor sufficient for success. You have been fortunate enough to have developed a certain level of intelligence, creativity, curiosity, understanding and open-mindedness, partly because of your genetics and your upbringing at home (so remember to thank your parents for those), and partly through Awty’s fabulous teaching (for which you need to remember to thank
your teachers).
While you have been here at Awty, you may or may not have learned this or that bit of technical knowledge, or this or that set of skills. But, don’t worry too much about remembering the details of the content taught to you in your classes; most of it will be out-of-date within a decade, and in any case (to quote the words of George Savile
that were written back in the mid-1600s), “education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught”. There is one exception – you do need to remember the message of this speech for the rest of your lives!
Regardless of what you have learnt and what you have already forgotten, you have been lucky enough to get into Awty, and you have had an educational and cultural experience that will make you stand out from the crowd. As you graduate together, I hope you think of those less fortunate than you are – which
is the majority of people your age in the world today – who must choose between food and education. There are people who won’t have access to a fraction of your opportunities simply because of accidents of birth. Luck offers you the opportunity to work hard, but whether you take that opportunity or not is up to you. So I urge you to take advantage of the fabulous opportunities that lie ahead of you, and as you benefit from these opportunities, remember also to create opportunities for others.
Let me flesh this out
for a moment. By the time you graduate from college or university, something like half a million dollars will have been spent on developing how your brain works, how you see and interact with the world – in other words, your education. Some of that will be from parents, some may be from governments (depending on where you study), and some may come through scholarship funding. Let’s place this figure in perspective. For that amount of money, you could build 8 primary schools in East Africa, or about 20 rural primary schools in Cambodia. I’ll express it in yet
another way – collectively, you are the resource equivalent of almost 1500 Cambodian primary schools sitting in this hall this morning. And as I have found in my own life, with great opportunity comes great responsibility – as a minimum, each and every one of you ought to be making a significantly greater contribution as an individual to our world in the years to come than about 8 entire East African primary schools.
This is not intended to be a
guilt trip, it is intended to be an appeal for awareness and responsible action. You have had an excellent international education, and you will enjoy the fruits of that. You understand global issues. You understand that in parts of Latin America, there is chronic malnutrition and so many families now simply have to eat less because food is twice as expensive as it was 10 years ago, but salaries are the same. We live in a global society, where hyperconnectivity means we can longer claim to be ignorant of the needs of the others. The singer Yusuf Islam, who you may know better as Cat Stevens, spoke about this issue just a few months ago, commenting that “We were given this
earth as a spherical place; there are no corners – borders, for me, don’t exist”. I hope you appreciate the responsibility that flows from the education you have received, and that you have the strong ethical principles to act on that responsibility.
Accepting responsibility and acting on principle is almost never easy – if it were easy, everyone would do it! When I read the biography that I bought in Philadelphia, I learned that Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for his principles. Okay, please don’t misunderstand me – I’m not comparing your life at Awty to Mandela’s life in prison. That would exaggerate the severity of the rules we have here at the
school, and it would trivialise the agonies Mandela endured for his principles. In 1975, while he was locked away in Kroonstad Prison, he wrote these words to his wife, Winnie: “The (prison) cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings. In judging progress as individuals, people tend to concentrate on external factors such as one’s social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education… But internal factors are far more important in assessing one’s development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure
generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others – qualities that are within easy reach of every soul – are the foundation of one’s life.”
In that same letter, he described himself as simply “an example of a mediocre man”. I suspect that Nelson Mandela is the only person in the world who would use the word ‘mediocre’ to describe Nelson Mandela – and what a powerful lesson in humility that is for the rest of us!
But he is right to
emphasise the importance of humility. Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself; it means thinking of yourself less often. Humble people are so focussed on serving others that don’t have time to focus on themselves.
And, as I look across at all of you seated before this morning, I see almost limitless potential for improving the world in the decades ahead if you put your hearts, your minds and your wallets to the task. But as I look across at you, our graduating students, I also ask questions, questions that I hope you also ask as you look across at each other – questions that will be fascinating to review at
your 20 year reunion in 2033, questions like these: Among you, who is going to have the courage to stand out and dare to be different? Who is going to have the nerve to take risks? Who is going to have the strength to choose change over the status quo? Who is going to have the integrity to ask ‘how can I help?’ rather than ‘what can you do for me?’. Who is going to have the fearlessness to lead, and the confidence to follow? Who is going to have the courage to look at others not as competition, but as potential collaborators to work with
to build a more productive and more sustainable world? Who among you are going to dare to be themselves?
Just as you are leaving Awty today, I too am leaving this summer. You will go to your destinations in various parts of the world, and I will be returning to my home country of Australia. The Australian Aborigines have a saying that applies to situations like the one we share today, and it goes like this: “We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love – and then we return home”.
Which brings me back to Nelson Mandela. I would like to leave you with one last thought from Nelson Mandela this morning. In 1998, he started writing a sequel to his autobiography. It will almost certainly never get finished. The beginning of Mandela’s draft of Chapter 1 will be the finish of my words to you this morning, but I hope you will also see these words as the commencement of Chapter 1 of the rest of your life as an Awty graduate – that life that starts at the end of this ceremony. This is, after all, a Commencement ceremony.
This is what Nelson Mandela wrote: “Men and women, all over the world, right down the centuries, come and go. Some leave nothing behind, not even their names. It would seem that they never existed at all. Others do leave something behind: the haunting memory of the evil deeds they committed against other people… (But) there is universal respect and even admiration for those who are humble and simple by nature, and who have absolute confidence in all human beings regardless of their social status. These are men and women, known and unknown, who have declared total war against all forms of gross violation of human rights wherever in the world such excesses occur. They are generally optimistic, believing that, in every community in the world, there are good men and women who believe in peace as the most powerful weapon in the search for lasting solutions… It is such good men and women who are the hope of the world.”
I hope it is you that he talking about!