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Colleges, like churches, have their distinctive seasonal rhythms, their own liturgical calendars. Many colleges are now
in a season which, at least for students, involves penance, self-denial, and prayer. Anybody who believes that prayer has
been banished from the schools should visit a campus during this secular Lent called final exams.
Soon colleges and universities everywhere will observe their most glorious feast day of the year. Commencement is often just
the second time when we as professors see our students standing with their families. This time it is confident young graduates
and smiles all around, where before we saw nervous young freshmen with parents who didn’t quite know what to do with
themselves. It’s a very happy day!
So to our St. Paul’s graduates, whether you are here with us today or still away at school, we’re proud of you,
your families and friends are proud of you, and you should be proud of yourselves. In honoring you we also honor all those
who have helped you along the way.
This morning I invite you to think with me about two mental images which can be applied to the process we call “getting
an education.” Many of you entered college with an image of earning a degree that looks like what a hurdler sees at
the starting line: a series of obstacles lies ahead, and you must clear each one as quickly as possible, taking care not
to knock any of them over. Once past a hurdle, forget it and move on. At the end, collect your prize.
This figure of speech can be helpful, and we may have actually encouraged you to think this way (One hurdle at a time! Avoid
risk! Eyes on the prize!). Come to think of it, the “eyes on the prize” business comes from St. Paul—the
Apostle, that is, not the church. But by now you have discovered that a rewarding college experience is not necessarily so
linear, so risk averse, or so deadly serious as the 400 meter hurdles, and you certainly know there is no finish line where
learning stops. You might appreciate another kind of simile from a blogger named David Warlick:
My son sits in his bedroom with a TV, VCR, DVD player, video game system, a small video camera, a digital camera, a computer,
and a Video iPod. Each product was initially designed to perform a specific task, allowing us to be entertained or to record
images and sound. My son, however, spends his time mixing them together, drawing audio and video from his video games and
from movies, and mixing them with video and still images that he and his friends make to produce a different and entertaining
product. Information, to him, is never finished. It’s just a raw material with which he can make something new.
It is important, I believe, that we look at a curriculum in the same way, that it is raw material, something we can mix in
different ways to produce learning experiences that help our students teach themselves. I think it may also be interesting
and valuable to treat ourselves and our students the same way. That rather than graduating finished students who are ready
for the world, we produce people who are raw material, not only capable of adapting to a rapidly changing world, but also
able to continue to learn, unlearn, and relearn, so that they can shape that world into something better. (1)
You get his point. Like Warlick’s son and the circle of friends with whom he made new things, you have grown up with
the internet, which, as David Weinberger said, “has enabled a self-organizing…growth of content and links on a
scale the world has never before experienced.” What Weinberger calls this “loose federation of documents—many
small pieces loosely joined” lets us make our own connections, take charge of our own learning, and produce new knowledge
in amazing ways. (2)
My point is less about gadgets and the web than about you. Whether you are a techno-geek or a lover of the arts (or both!)
you have the ability to learn and create knowledge in ways that look more like what happens in that kid’s bedroom than
in the hurdles. I hope you are discovering that real education cuts across the artificial boundaries of disciplines and courses,
that it is about connections and relationships, and that it invites you into communities of learners, some called professors
and some called students.
I also hope you are recognizing the truth that learning, discovery, and the making of new things can produce harmful results
as well as helpful ones, and that no technology can equip us to discern the difference. Being self-directed and creative
learners in this new digital age gives us the opportunity to do good things for the human family and to avoid doing harm,
but to do that we must be guided by values which are as old as our most ancient ethical and religious traditions.
We absorb these values, and most of all that we learn, in communities—in the little community of our families, in faith
communities like St. Paul’s and St. Martin’s, and in learning communities in school, at work, and in our civic
lives. In community we not only learn “stuff,” but we also come to know our true selves.
Parker Palmer, a gifted teacher and writer, has shaped my own thinking along these lines. (3) Palmer is a Quaker, and his
ideas about community reflect the intentional listening of a Quaker meeting. Palmer has also pondered what science is telling
us these days about learning and discovery, and he draws insights from modern biology, ecology, and physics to create a mental
image of learning where the learner and the subject of learning are in relationship with each other and where learners are
not running a race in separate lanes but joining in a shared act of discovery. It looks a little like Weinberger’s
image of “small pieces loosely joined.”
“To teach,” Palmer says, “is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced.” For
Palmer, “Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline….[I]n
the community of truth, as in real life, truth does not reside primarily in propositions, and education is more than delivering
propositions to passive auditors. In the community of truth…teaching and learning look less like General Motors and
more like a town meeting, less a bureaucracy and more like bedlam.”
Now I’ve attended many faculty meetings in my time, and I’ve never heard teaching and learning described that
way. But I have seen it happen. I’ve seen it in a classroom or laboratory where professors and students gather around
some big subject and in a service-learning project where students are guided to contemplate the larger meaning of the work
they are doing for others. I hope our graduates are already experiencing this way of learning and that they will seek it
out long after crossing the finish line of commencement.
When all is said and done, learning stuff is not the only purpose of human development—not for students, not for parents
or professors, not for anybody. We are all, in some sense, nervous freshmen and anxious test-takers, fearful that our best
intentions will produce bad results and not quite sure of what we want to be when we grow up.
Parker Palmer recalls his own transformation from fearful uncertainty to discernment and deep gladness. It happened at a
Quaker living-learning community near Philadelphia within what he called a “circle of trust.” This intimate circle
was grounded in two beliefs: “First, we all have an inner teacher whose guidance is more reliable than anything we
can get from a doctrine, ideology, institution, or leader…and second, we all need other people to invite, amplify, and
help us discern the inner teacher’s voice.” (4) In school and beyond school, such circles of trust can help us
find our own true selves and discover our own vocations.
My prayer for you, the graduates, as you move on to the next big thing, is that life will be more than a race, that learning
will look like the bedlam in young Warlick’s room, and that your future will be graced by communities of learning and
of trust.
Congratulations, and amen.
(1) http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/category/flat-world/page/2/. See post for March 15, 2006.
(2) David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined (A Unified Theory of the Web), ix.
(3) See The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, especially Chapter 4.
(4) Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, pp. 25-26.
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