NOTEBOOK: Education for Change

NOTEBOOK: Education for Change

I was invited to give the keynote address in the graduation ceremonies for the Grade 12 graduating class of the Jean Vanier Catholic Secondary School last June 24.

It was a special honor for me for two reasons. First, it was my first time to speak before a huge audience of youth where their parents, teachers and school authorities were present. There were about 120 graduating students and the audience was more than 400. Second, it was the school of Jeffrey Reodica, the 17-year old who was fatally shot by a Toronto police officer in May 2004.

Here is my prepared speech, some parts of which I omitted due to time constraints.

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I have agonized over what message I’m going to deliver to you. You are younger than my children but you are older than my grandchildren. I have spent decades relating to my kids and some years relating to my grandkids. I don’t know if I know your generation enough to be able to stimulate your mind and touch your heart.

I decided I would just speak from the heart, from my perspective as an immigrant who brought his family from a Third World country. I understand a vast majority of the student population of your school come from Asian or African or non-English and non-French speaking backgrounds. A significant number come from Filipino families living in Scarborough.

When I graduated from high school in the Philippines, and that was 44 years ago, 1964 to be exact, I was extremely excited. During our graduation ceremonies, aside from the excitement of having pictures taken with my classmates, with a medal or so pinned on our white robes, my mind was preoccupied with the prospect of soon becoming a university student with all the stature and prestige that would come with it. We had a distinguished speaker, a famous economist who later became a Senator. But I didn’t listen to a word he said. All I could remember was his American accent, he having been schooled in a Jesuit-run university.

So you see, if you now have the attitude I had then, you wouldn’t hear a word I say here. And I don’t blame you. Your mind must be pre-occupied with what suit or dress you’d be wearing on your prom night, if you haven’t had it yet. Or maybe on how you now look in the eyes of your girl friend or boy friend. But still, if you listen enough, I’ll share with you some life lessons you will still remember forty years from now.

When I asked your guidance counselor what was I expected to say on this graduation day, I was told I need to inspire the graduating students. I assume it is about inspiring you to succeed in your chosen careers. But that is assuming you already know what career you want to build, which is not a reasonable assumption to make. Many young students of your age do not know what they want in life. In a vague way, maybe many of you want to go to university or college and eventually start a profession, start a business or just have a good job.

But in the pursuit of your goals, if you have set them up at this time, you will be doing so in very specific and given political, economic, social and cultural environment. You are not pursuing your career goals in a vacuum. And these conditions either help you or work against you. What do I mean by this?

Let’s start with the economic conditions right now. We are either seeing or facing a recession in north America. Thousands of people are losing their jobs. Millions of houses in the United States are being foreclosed – being taken by the banks from owners who could not pay their mortgages. The price of oil keeps on rising which pushes the price of everything to go up. More and more people are realizing their money is buying less and less of what they need. More and more people are being driven below the poverty line. More and more people are going to the food banks. Child poverty is in an all time high.

In other words, times are getting more difficult. Life is hard, times are tough. There is an economic crisis that is building up.

Where does that put you, the graduating Grade 12 students? How will this affect your pursuit of your careers?

It is said that today’s adult population, including the baby boomers – those born from 1946, after the war, to 1964 – are having a tougher time coping financially than their parents did. And you, the generation younger than Generation X, or Gen-X, will face even tougher times than your parents are experiencing right now.

This will mean, the cost of university or college education will be harder for your parents to shoulder. Even if you get part time jobs or summer jobs, post-secondary education will be costlier and harder to save up for. Your parents are working very hard to put you in school and maybe even university. Understand their situation. You cannot and should not blame them in case they couldn’t afford your university education. Believe me, they want you to be in university. Some of your parents may be holding two or three jobs to raise their families in an expensive city like Toronto. Add to that responsibility the cost of your university education, which is no joking matter in Canada. Have a heart big enough to understand their situation. Help them out if you can.

If they cannot afford to send you to university at this time, don’t get upset just because some of your classmates and friends will go to University of Toronto or York University, University of Waterloo or Queens University. If they can only afford to send you to Ryerson Polytechnic University or George Brown College or Seneca College, be thankful and finish your course with distinction. You are lucky that you have parents who send you to school. There are thousands and thousands of youth in Canada who haven’t seen the inside of a high school or even finished Grade 8. There are millions or maybe hundreds of millions of youth in Third World countries, especially war-torn countries, those plagued by unimaginable poverty and disease, who have not spent a single day in school. Some of them have not experienced being cared for by their parents who had died of disease, poverty or in wars.

Believe me, even as some of you have parents who could not afford to buy you an iPod or a fancy cell phone, you are still wonderfully blessed you have your parents and you are graduating from high school. You are blessed you have your school, your principal and vice principals and your teachers and support staff whose job it is to help and guide you earn a decent education.

So that is my first advise to you: Be grateful for what you have. Rest assured there are thousands in Canada and millions in the world who don’t have what you have.

Now, whether you get to university or college, or you don’t get to pursue post-secondary education at all for whatever reason, or you don’t get to register in a course you’ve always wanted, always take it with a positive attitude.

Whether you become a university student or a college student or needed to get a job right after high school, you should always be guided by one thing and only one thing: Do what you love, pursue your passion and excel in what you do.

When you enter the university, it will be a whole new ball game. You will be given heavy academic responsibilities. You have to read more books, stretch your brain more, spend sleepless nights studying. You will be required to write and speak out your mind on subject matters you hardly know about. But your gains will be bigger. You will discover new fields of learning, new sciences and the arts, history and social studies. Your horizons will be wider, your view of the world will be bigger. You will learn deeper about the cultures and histories of other peoples and countries. You will understand the world better. You will mature intellectually and with your association with other students, academic experts and school authorities, you will also mature emotionally.

In your journey to higher learning, a whole new world will open up to you. And you will develop critical thinking. You will be able to form your own opinion with conviction. You will develop an insatiable thirst for knowledge. You will ask many questions and will not be satisfied with traditional answers. You will learn the value of excellence in your academic pursuits. If you achieve this level of intellectual sophistication, all the money and time spent for your university education, all the blood, sweat and tears that were shed so you’ll be a university student, will not have been in vain.

It was Albert Einstein who said that “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”

In short, education is not about grades and diplomas, though they are important in getting jobs and they could be a measure of academic achievement. But education is more of what remains in your mind, how you think and how you connect information and ideas to the real world you live in. It is about the quality of your mind and not the quantity of information you have gathered for your exams and term papers.

Einstein also said: “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

We used to say in our university days, “Don’t let your schooling interfere with your education.” Some of those who said that took it so seriously they dropped out of school. For good reasons, like the political turmoil that defined those years in that country.

And there are distinguished dropouts who were stupendously successful. Bill Gates of Microsoft, the world’s richest person, dropped out of Harvard when he, at 20 years of age, found it too boring. He is now worth $58 billion. Michael Dell of Dell Computers dropped out of university as freshman at 19 years of age in 1984. Today he is worth $19 billion. In the Philippines, a school dropout became the country’s President with the highest number of votes ever garnered by a President. (Though he was later convicted for plunder.) A Filipino writer, awarded National Artist and was one of the most highly regarded for writing in English, was a dropout. The list goes on.

But don’t get me wrong. If you start university education, by all means, finish it. That distinction alone can be crucial in how people regard you in this society. And there’s too much to learn in university you won’t exhaust it in a lifetime. University experience can give you a kind of confidence in your intellectual capacity for whatever field you’re in.

Another clarification: I don’t mean to say that success is measured only in terms of how materially wealthy one becomes. You can be successful in life without being filthy rich as the billionaires I have mentioned. It all depends on your life’s purpose. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years and wealth was never one of his goals in life. Yet he led the liberation of South Africa from the clutches of apartheid, a form of racial discrimination. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not one of America’s richest. Yet he was a leader and now a symbol of the American civil rights movement.

There is one last message I’d like to convey to you. You will recall that 17-year-old Jeffrey Reodica was a student in your school when a tragic incident ended his life in May 2004. He was fatally shot by a Toronto police officer.

As a result of community protests and cries for justice, with the active participation of students in this school, a public inquiry was called by the Ontario government where the police officers involved and dozens of witnesses were questioned to determine what really happened that led to his death. In that Inquest that lasted for months, Jeffrey’s family’s lawyers and the lawyers of the Community Alliance for Social Justice (CASJ) engaged the lawyers of the police in tough arguments and debates. The Inquest jury adopted seven recommendations, five of which required the Toronto Police to implement certain changes in their policing practices. And they cost more than $400,000 in the police budget. The community advocates and Jeffrey’s family won certain changes that were supposed to prevent a similar incident from happening again. Although the perpetrator of the killing was not brought to justice, a qualified victory for the community and the family was apparently achieved.

The incident and the resulting policing changes provide us life lessons even the police authorities now recognize and one of them is that community concern and action can lead to positive changes no matter who were responsible for the wrongdoing.

My final word to you, graduating Grade 12 Class of 2008, is this: As you reach this milestone in your education and as you pursue higher education in your journey to start your careers, be deeply aware of the political and economic environment. The world out there will not always be kind to you. Some of the individuals and institutions you will encounter will not be fair to you and will treat you unjustly. Some of them you will see blatantly victimize others. You should have the courage to fight them for the benefit of those whose rights are trampled upon. You should always be on the side of those who are victimized and oppressed. Like the boy from your school who should have graduated years before you — Jeffrey Reodica, had his life not been taken by an officer of the law.

After all, what’s the value of our education if we allow the wrongs to prevail in our midst? What’s the value of our education if we look the other way when others are being robbed of their dignity, and worse, their life?

I believe education’s primary purpose is not only to deepen our understanding of the world but also to strengthen our humanity so we may become more just and humane to have the courage to change the world for the better.

Thank you and congratulations.