Convocation 2011: Student Speaker Address

By this time tomorrow, I will be a Harvard certified Master of International Education Policy. All of us will have mastered (wipe hands) education. Others here today will be doctors of Education, which is somehow even more masterful. If someone in the Radcliffe Yard were to have a sudden educational emergency, there is no better prepared crowd in the world.

And yet, if you are anything like me, you are leaving school with more questions than answers. If your experience was like mine, every hill you climbed brought higher hills into view until one day, mid mountain, here we are; slightly startled, adding fabulous new letters to our names. Masters though we undoubtedly are, if we were to set up a flip chart here on stage and attempt to draft a communal definition of the domain and purposes of education, would we measure our time on this basic task in minutes, or days? Would we ever, together as Masters, be able? How about Quality Teaching? Citizenship? Intelligence? Well, I guess we could let Howard Gardener do intelligence. That wouldn’t be that hard actually. We might need a few more imaginary flipcharts.

Beyond theory, there are the existential questions. Just who am I? Who am I, from Cambridge, to design policies and dream up programs affecting lives across the world? A popular mantra in the development community is that the days of the white man parachuting in to solve the world’s problems are long gone. Well, my degree is in International Education and they don’t come too much whiter than I am. Maybe here at Harvard they do. But the question remains, who am I? Who am I to theorize about real lives?

An Indian teacher trainer, and HGSE alum, I heard speak a few months back recounted how after a very successful program on exploratory, student centered education, one of the teachers in his class invited him back to her rural classroom. When he arrived, he was surprised to find 60 barefoot children sitting on the floor staring up at him. His student handed him a piece of chalk and asked, “Can you here, with these children, show me how to teach like you did in your workshop?” He looked down at the children, over at the cracked black board and realized he could not. Could you? And more importantly, much more importantly, could you get out of bed and do it again the next day, and the next? And for the rest of your lives? Not a two year stint in TFA or Peace Corps, no exit strategy or ladder to climb, for life, every day motivated and smiling? I couldn’t. I get nervous committing to a cell phone plan. So what use am I? After a year of education at HGSE, who am I to tell a teacher who has dedicated 30 years to educating children in her own community how to run her classroom and, in part, her life? Standing here today, honestly, I’m no one. So if not international education, just what am I a master of? And what has this been about?

In answer to that question, and I do have something like an answer, I’m not trying to depress anyone, I’d like to share a story I’ve stolen from our own class marshal Rich Beyer. Rich’s niece started kindergarten this past September. She came home from her very first day of school and excitedly told her parents about the people she’d met and the things she’d learned. As her father tucked her into bed that night, he asked, “So sweetheart, are you excited about going back to school tomorrow?” She looked up at him with a confused smile and said, “No, Daddy, I already went to school. ”

How do you finish that conversation? Not the end of a journey, the introduction. Not the last step, the first. That tomorrow is another school day. Well, for me, that is where we are today. With our masters and doctorates still fresh, a year, or eight, of learning behind us, we are lying in bed with a choice to make. Was our time here, our day of kindergarten, the sum total of our learning or the orientation session to something much more meaningful? Have we mastered education, or have we simply taken a step?

Here is perhaps the one thing I am a master of. I know that what I know, what I’ve learned here, is a foundation and not a solution. I know that meaningful answers are contextual and complicated and that those answers are not written on the back of my Harvard degree and were not handed to me with my American passport or birth certificate. That our ideas do not succeed because of the quality of our education, the novelty of our approach or the purity of our intentions. For as much we are rightly encouraged to go out and make our mark, we do not leave the world a better place simply because we leave it different. Innovation is not a synonym for progress any more than development is a synonym for happiness. As educators, our call to action is not, What can I make happen? What can I change? but rather, What needs to be done? Our accomplishments, if they mean anything, will not be measured in the programs we implement, the influence we wield or the citations we accumulate, but in the dignity, compassion and opportunity we contribute to the world through the lives we touch.

I don’t know how to affect large scale change in rural India. I don’t know how to best use technology to help dyslexic children in inner city Chicago, I don’t know how to most effectively crush the hopes and dreams of those greedy, greedy teachers in Wisconsin. With their health care… I am not a master of knowing, certainly not of pretending to know. If anything, I’m a master of I don’t know. I don’t know but I can help you find out. I don’t know but if you will teach me, I can teach you too. And for today, for me, that is something to take pride in. And for today, that is enough. Because today was a beginning, and tomorrow is a school day. As we head out as teachers and educational leaders, program managers and policy makers, as we listen and are listened to, as we shape and are shaped by the events surrounding us, I hope we will look back at the degrees we receive tomorrow not as certificates of mastery, or affirmation of our assumptions, but as written invitations to a life-long dialogue, to a lifetime of learning no less than we teach, adapting no less than we transform. For as much as education needs the genius beneath this tent, for as much as the world needs you to lead, it needs more the quiet heroism of practitioners who don’t simply proselytize the change they want to see in the world, but live it, reflectively and humbly.

For me, today was the first day of kindergarten, a Monday in early September and we are lying in bed with a choice to make. Tomorrow, I’m going to get out of bed, pack up my thermos and go back to class. I’m going back the next day, and the day after that. And, inshallah, for the rest of my life. As you spread out across the country and the world, as you put to practice what you’ve learned here, even as you bury yourself in the important work awaiting you, I hope to see you all in class, listening openly, questioning incessantly, all of us taking notes as fast and joyously as our small hands are able.

On behalf of the HGSE class of 2011, a heartfelt thank you to the family and friends, faculty and staff who are with us here today and who were with us during the longer harder days that led to this one.

Thank you and congratulations to the class of 2011.

For full coverage of Commencement 2011, visit http://wpdev.gse.harvard.edu/news-impact/tag/commencement/.