Ted Talks Ken Robinson says Schools Kill Creativity” .docx

Ted Talks: Ken Robinson says “Schools Kill
Creativity”
Speaker: Ken Robinson. TED Talks, Filmed Feb 2006. Watch
video here.
Good morning. How are you? It's been great, hasn't it? I've been
blown away by the whole thing.
In fact, I'm leaving. (Laughter) There have been three themes,
haven't there, running through the
conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One
is the extraordinary evidence of
human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and
in all of the people here. Just the
variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it's put us in
a place where we have no idea
what's going to happen, in terms of the future. No idea how this
may play out.
I have an interest in education -- actually, what I find is
everybody has an interest in education.
Don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner
party, and you say you work in
education -- actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly,

if you work in education.
(Laughter) You're not asked. And you're never asked back,
curiously. That's strange to me. But if
you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What
do you do?" and you say you
work in education, you can see the blood run from their face.
They're like, "Oh my God," you
know, "Why me? My one night out all week." (Laughter) But if
you ask about their education,
they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that
goes deep with people, am I right?
Like religion, and money and other things. I have a big interest
in education, and I think we all
do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's
education that's meant to take us into
this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children
starting school this year will be retiring
in 2065. Nobody has a clue -- despite all the expertise that's
been on parade for the past four days
-- what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet
we're meant to be educating them for
it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless,
on the really extraordinary

capacities that children have -- their capacities for innovation. I
mean, Sirena last night was a
marvel, wasn't she? Just seeing what she could do. And she's
exceptional, but I think she's not, so
to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have
there is a person of extraordinary
dedication who found a talent. And my contention is, all kids
have tremendous talents. And we
squander them, pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about
education and I want to talk about
creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important
in education as literacy, and we
should treat it with the same status. (Applause) Thank you. That
was it, by the way. Thank you
very much. (Laughter) So, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born ...
no. (Laughter)
I heard a great story recently -- I love telling it -- of a little girl
who was in a drawing lesson. She
was six and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said
this little girl hardly ever paid
attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was
fascinated and she went over to her
and she said, "What are you drawing?" And the girl said, "I'm
drawing a picture of God." And

the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And
the girl said, "They will in a
minute." (Laughter)
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea
tivity
When my son was four in England -- actually he was four
everywhere, to be honest. (Laughter)
If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that
year. He was in the Nativity
play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big. It was a big
story. Mel Gibson did the sequel.
You may have seen it: "Nativity II." But James got the part of
Joseph, which we were thrilled
about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had
the place crammed full of agents in
T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" (Laughter) He didn't
have to speak, but you know the bit
where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and
they bring gold, frankincense and
myrhh. This really happened. We were sitting there and I think
they just went out of sequence,
because we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You
OK with that?" And he said,

"Yeah, why? Was that wrong?" They just switched, that was it.
Anyway, the three boys came in -
- four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads -- and they put
these boxes down, and the first boy
said, "I bring you gold." And the second boy said, "I bring you
myrhh." And the third boy said,
"Frank sent this." (Laughter)
What these things have in common is that kids will take a
chance. If they don't know, they'll
have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.
Now, I don't mean to say that
being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do
know is, if you're not prepared to
be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original -- if
you're not prepared to be wrong. And
by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that
capacity. They have become frightened
of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the
way. We stigmatize mistakes. And
we're now running national education systems where mistakes
are the worst thing you can make.
And the result is that we are educating people out of their
creative capacities. Picasso once said

this -- he said that all children are born artists. The problem is
to remain an artist as we grow up.
I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity,
we grow out of it. Or rather, we get
educated out if it. So why is this?
I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact,
we moved from Stratford to Los
Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition that
was. (Laughter) Actually, we lived
in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is
where Shakespeare's father was
born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think
of Shakespeare having a father,
do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being
a child, do you? Shakespeare
being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some
point. He was in somebody's
English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be?
(Laughter) "Must try harder." Being sent
to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now,"
to William Shakespeare, "and
put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It's confusing
everybody." (Laughter)
Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just

want to say a word about the
transition, actually. My son didn't want to come. I've got two
kids. He's 21 now; my daughter's
16. He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he
had a girlfriend in England. This
was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month.
Mind you, they'd had their fourth
anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. Anyway,
he was really upset on the plane,
and he said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we
were rather pleased about that,
frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the
country. (Laughter)
But something strikes you when you move to America and when
you travel around the world:
Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of
subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter
where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At
the top are mathematics and
languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts.
Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty
much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art
and music are normally given a

higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an
education system on the planet that
teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them
mathematics. Why? Why not? I think
this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is
dance. Children dance all the
time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't
we? Did I miss a meeting?
(Laughter) Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we
start to educate them
progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their
heads. And slightly to one side.
If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "What's it
for, public education?" I think you'd
have to conclude -- if you look at the output, who really
succeeds by this, who does everything
that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the
winners -- I think you'd have to
conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the
world is to produce university
professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top.
And I used to be one, so there.
(Laughter) And I like university professors, but you know, we
shouldn't hold them up as the

high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form
of life, another form of life. But
they're rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them.
There's something curious about
professors in my experience -- not all of them, but typically --
they live in their heads. They live
up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you
know, in a kind of literal way. They
look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads,
don't they? (Laughter) It's a way of
getting their head to meetings. If you want real evidence of out-
of-body experiences, by the way,
get yourself along to a residential conference of senior
academics, and pop into the discotheque
on the final night. (Laughter) And there you will see it -- grown
men and women writhing
uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go
home and write a paper about it.
Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic
ability. And there's a reason.
The whole system was invented -- around the world, there were
no public systems of education,
really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet
the needs of industrialism. So

the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most
useful subjects for work are at
the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from
things at school when you were a kid,
things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job
doing that. Is that right? Don't do
music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't
be an artist. Benign advice --
now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a
revolution. And the second is
academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view
of intelligence, because the
universities designed the system in their image. If you think of
it, the whole system of public
education around the world is a protracted process of university
entrance. And the consequence
is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think
they're not, because the thing they
were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually
stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to
go on that way.
In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people
worldwide will be graduating through

education than since the beginning of history. More people, and
it's the combination of all the
things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation
effect on work, and demography
and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren't
worth anything. Isn't that true?
When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you
didn't have a job it's because you
didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly. (Laughter) But
now kids with degrees are often
heading home to carry on playing video games, because you
need an MA where the previous job
required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a
process of academic inflation. And it
indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath
our feet. We need to radically
rethink our view of intelligence.
We know three things about intelligence. One, it's diverse. We
think about the world in all the
ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in
sound, we think kinesthetically. We
think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly,
intelligence is dynamic. If you look at

the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a
number of presentations,
intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided
into compartments. In fact,
creativity -- which I define as the process of having original
ideas that have value -- more often
than not comes about through the interaction of different
disciplinary ways of seeing things.
The brain is intentionally -- by the way, there's a shaft of nerves
that joins the two halves of the
brain called the corpus callosum. It's thicker in women.
Following off from Helen yesterday, I
think this is probably why women are better at multi-tasking.
Because you are, aren't you?
There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.
If my wife is cooking a meal at
home -- which is not often, thankfully. (Laughter) But you
know, she's doing -- no, she's good at
some things -- but if she's cooking, you know, she's dealing
with people on the phone, she's
talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-
heart surgery over here. If I'm
cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the
hook, if she comes in I get annoyed.

I say, "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here. Give me a
break." (Laughter) Actually, you
know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in a forest and
nobody hears it, did it happen?
Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great t-shirt really recently
which said, "If a man speaks his
mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
(Laughter)
And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing
a new book at the moment called
"Epiphany," which is based on a series of interviews with
people about how they discovered
their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's
really prompted by a conversation I
had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have
never heard of; she's called Gillian
Lynne -- have you heard of her? Some have. She's a
choreographer and everybody knows her
work. She did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera." She's
wonderful. I used to be on the board of
the Royal Ballet in England, as you can see. Anyway, Gillian
and I had lunch one day and I said,
"Gillian, how'd you get to be a dancer?" And she said it was
interesting; when she was at school,

she was really hopeless. And the school, in the '30s, wrote to
her parents and said, "We think
Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate; she
was fidgeting. I think now they'd
say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and
ADHD hadn't been invented at
this point. It wasn't an available condition. (Laughter) People
weren't aware they could have that.
Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled
room, and she was there with her
mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she
sat on her hands for 20 minutes
while this man talked to her mother about all the problems
Gillian was having at school. And at
the end of it -- because she was disturbing people; her
homework was always late; and so on,
little kid of eight -- in the end, the doctor went and sat next to
Gillian and said, "Gillian, I've
listened to all these things that your mother's told me, and I
need to speak to her privately." He
said, "Wait here. We'll be back; we won't be very long," and
they went and left her. But as they

went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his
desk. And when they got out the
room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And
the minute they left the room, she
said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they
watched for a few minutes and he
turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick;
she's a dancer. Take her to a dance
school."
I said, "What happened?" She said, "She did. I can't tell you
how wonderful it was. We walked in
this room and it was full of people like me. People who couldn't
sit still. People who had to move
to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet; they did
tap; they did jazz; they did
modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned
for the Royal Ballet School; she
became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal
Ballet. She eventually graduated from
the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company -- the
Gillian Lynne Dance Company --
met Andrew Lloyd Weber. She's been responsible for some of
the most successful musical
theater productions in history; she's given pleasure to millions;

and she's a multi-millionaire.
Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to
calm down.
Now, I think ... (Applause) What I think it comes to is this: Al
Gore spoke the other night about
ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson.
I believe our only hope for the
future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in
which we start to reconstitute our
conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education
system has mined our minds in the
way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity.
And for the future, it won't serve
us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which
we're educating our children. There
was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the
insects were to disappear from the
earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human
beings disappeared from the
earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish." And he's
right.
What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We
have to be careful now that we
use this gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios that

we've talked about. And the only
way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the
richness they are and seeing our
children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate
their whole being, so they can face
this future. By the way -- we may not see this future, but they
will. And our job is to help them
make something of it. Thank you very much.
Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address -
May 21, 2005
Written and Delivered by David Foster Wallace
(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go
ahead,
because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while
pulling up
his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].)
Greetings
["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of
2005.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they
happen to meet
an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and

says
"Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish
swim on for a
bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and
goes
"What the hell is water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches,
the
deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story
["thing"] turns
out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the
genre, but if
you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise,
older fish
explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I
am not the
wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most
obvious,
important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and
talk
about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a
banal
platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult
existence,
banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I
wish to
suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm
supposed
to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to
explain why
the degree you are about to receive has actual human value
instead of just
a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive

cliché in the
commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts
education is not
so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about
quote teaching
you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never
liked hearing
this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you
needed
anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even
got
admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you
already know
how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts
cliché
turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant
education
in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't
really about
the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to
think about.
If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about
seems too
obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish
and
water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism
about the
value of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys
sitting
together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the
guys is

religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about
the
existence of God with that special intensity that comes after
about the
fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't
have actual
reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever
experimented
with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got
caught away
from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost
and I
couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I
fell to my
knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm
lost in
this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And
now, in the
bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well
then you must
believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The
atheist just rolls
his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened
to come
wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts
analysis:
the exact same experience can mean two totally different things
to two
different people, given those people's two different belief
templates and
two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.
Because we
prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal
arts analysis

do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the
other
guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up
talking
about just where these individual templates and beliefs come
from.
Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a
person's
most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his
experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-
size; or
automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if
how we
construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal,
intentional
choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The
nonreligious guy
is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the
passing
Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there
are
plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of
their own
interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than
atheists, at
least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly
the same
as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness
that amounts
to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know
he's
locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching
me how to
think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less
arrogant. To have
just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties.
Because a
huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically
certain of is, it
turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the
hard way, as I
predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I
tend to be
automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate
experience
supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the
universe; the
realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely
think
about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so
socially
repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our
default
setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it:
there is no
experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of.
The
world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind
YOU, to
the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And
so on.
Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated
to you
somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about
compassion
or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a
matter of
virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow
altering
or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which
is to be
deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret
everything
through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural
default
setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted",
which I
suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious
question is how
much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves
actual
knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably
the most
dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own
case -- is
that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get
lost in
abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying
attention to
what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is
going on
inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to

stay alert
and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant
monologue
inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty
years after
my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that
the liberal
arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually
shorthand for a
much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really
means
learning how to exercise some control over how and what you
think. It
means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you
pay
attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from
experience.
Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life,
you will be
totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind
being an
excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface,
actually
expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit
coincidental that
adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot
themselves
in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is
that most of
these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the
trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your
liberal

arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going
through
your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead,
unconscious, a
slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being
uniquely,
completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may
sound like
hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain
fact is that
you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in
day out"
really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult
American life
that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such
part
involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents
and older
folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you
get up in the
morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate
job, and
you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day
you're
tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and
have a
good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the
sack early
because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all
again. But
then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had

time to
shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now
after work
you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the
end of
the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to
the store
takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there,
the
supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of
day when
all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some
grocery
shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-
killing
muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you
want to be
but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all
over the
huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want
and you
have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired,
hurried
people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because
this is a
long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies,
except
now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even
though
it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly
long, which
is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out
on the
frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job
whose daily
tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of

us here at
a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you
pay for
your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that
is the
absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy,
flimsy, plastic
bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that
pulls
maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded,
bumpy,
littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home
through
slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et
cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been
part of you
graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after
year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly
meaningless
routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that
petty,
frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing
is gonna
come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long
checkout
lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious
decision about

how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed
and
miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default
setting is
the certainty that situations like this are really all about me.
About MY
hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and
it's going
to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way.
And who
are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most
of them
are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman
they
seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that
people
are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And
look at
how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts
form of my
default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic
being
disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and
Hummers
and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-
gallon tanks
of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious
bumper-
stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly
selfish
vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud
applause] (this is
an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly
selfish

vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and
aggressive drivers.
And I can think about how our children's children will despise
us for
wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the
climate, and
how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are,
and how
modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine.
Lots of us
do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic
that it
doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's
the
automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded
parts of
adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious
belief that I
am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and
feelings are
what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to
think about
these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles
stopped and
idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people
in SUV's
have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find

driving so
terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a
huge, heavy
SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer
that just
cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child
is hurt or
sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the
hospital,
and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is
actually I who
am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that
everyone
else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and
frustrated as I
am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more
tedious
and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or
that I'm
saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone
expects you to
just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and
effort, and if
you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you
just flat out
won't want to.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice,
you can
choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up
lady who
just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not

usually like
this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand
of a
husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady
is the low-
wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday
helped
your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem
through some
small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is
likely, but it's
also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider.
If you're
automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are
operating on
your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider
possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you
really learn how
to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It
will
actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot,
slow,
consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred,
on fire
with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the
mystical
oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing
that's
capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to
see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning

how to be
well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning
and what
doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-
to day
trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.
There is
no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The
only choice
we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe
choosing
some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or
Allah, be
it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble
Truths, or
some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much
anything
else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and
things, if
they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never
have
enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your
body
and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And
when time
and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they
finally
grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's
been codified
as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of
every great
story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily
consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and
you will
need ever more power over others to numb you to your own
fear.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up
feeling stupid,
a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the
insidious thing
about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful,
it's that
they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day
after day,
getting more and more selective about what you see and how
you measure
value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're
doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from
operating on
your default settings, because the so-called real world of men
and money
and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and
frustration
and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has
harnessed
these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and
comfort
and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny
skull-sized
kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of
freedom has

much to recommend it. But of course there are all different
kinds of
freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear
much talk
about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving
and
[unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important
kind of
freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and
being able
truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over
and over in
myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding
how to
think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting,
the rat race,
the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some
infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or
grandly
inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to
sound.
What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a
whole lot of
rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to
think of it
whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some
finger-
wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about
morality or
religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost
nothing to
do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple
awareness;
awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain
sight all
around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding
ourselves over and
over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in
the adult
world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché
turns out
to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it
commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.

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