I’ve been asked to speak to you today, I assume, because Dr. Piltch and Mrs. van Steenwyk believed that 16 years among you might qualify me to give advice or maybe just say something profound at this important moment in all of our lives. One wonders how closely they have been listening all these years in Monday assemblies, but I am nonetheless happy to test this premise.

If any of you are contemplating a graduate degree in education, I will now save you a big pile of money by sharing with you a question that preoccupies many education schools in the United States at present.

Simply put, the question is this: Should schools be copying machines or phone booths? Should schools reproduce the social order, or should they transform it?

If we come down on the school-as-copying-machine side of the question, then you all stand today on the threshold of becoming your parents. It may be that one or two of you will be slightly changed—will perhaps be a little more or less attractive or pull down just a little more or less dough. But the overall result will be that the Class of 2006 will go forth into the world and do nothing to disturb things as they are.

Speaking for myself and my own children, I would say that for them simply to become like me will set a dismally low standard for their education and for the world.

Wars will be fought with their customary ruthlessness. Lives will be lost at the usual appalling rates. Prisoners will be subject to torture and abuse. Countries will be occupied, and insurgencies will spring up to oppose those occupations with the bomb and the gun. Large numbers of children will not get enough to eat, enough to learn, or enough love to make any difference at all in their own lives. Our air and water will grow more polluted by the day. The globe will warm, icecaps will melt, and in time, we humans will grind one another—and our world—into eternity’s fine cosmic dust.

Let us turn from that dispiriting set of possibilities to the other one I’ve suggested—the phone booth. I should pause here and explain for the youngsters in the audience that a phone booth is a relic of the era when people believed they needed privacy to talk on telephones. A person could stand in a phone booth comfortably and have a conversation that was heard only by the individual on the other end of the line.

As it happened, these phone booths were also ideal for superheroes—men and women possessed of super powers who occasionally donned costumes to engage in the struggle against evil, chaos, and bad guys with super powers. A Clark Kent could duck into a phone booth and transform himself into Superman in the blink of an eye.

If at this moment, each of you in the Class of 2006 is about to emerge from the phone booth, a big red “S” on your chest and a red cape flowing behind, then something truly extraordinary is happening right now before our very eyes. And in the days, months, and years to come, some of the problems I alluded to a moment ago—problems that are so familiar to us that they are in danger of losing their ability to shock or make us indignant—those problems may be on their way to getting solved.

This is obviously what most of the adults here would like to see happen. We want more for you than simply to be like us. Indeed, we need you to be heroes. Parents, I invite you to think back to the time when the young men and women now seated before you were captivated by the idea of some comic book superhero. There were capes and masks and wild leaps from the bed or the sofa. They threw themselves into these roles with a headlong seriousness that is now only approximated on college applications, SAT I’s and II’s, and AP’s. I want to suggest that there is untapped power in this energy, this impulse to take flight from the furniture.

But first I want to offer a brief example from my own experience of the limitations of copying machine education.

A few springs ago, I was in conference with a young man who had committed an academic honesty offense. "In conference" is probably a grandiose term for what I was doing, which could best be described as the Hammer and Stammer strategy: I would hammer away until he was ready to acknowledge that he had violated the Honor Code. The student would stammer his acquiescence, and the deal would be done. Hammer and Stammer.

So the interaction went something like this:

I said, “Did you think it was all right to go through your friend's backpack and dig out his homework after my announcement about not going through other people's things without permission?”

The question hung in the warm spring air, its answer pasted to its chest like a nametag at a potluck supper. But only silence.

I ventured again, “After all of the presentations on the Honor Code by the Vice President of the School and the members of the student government, did you think it was okay to copy verbatim your friend's homework responses?”

A distant cheer erupted from Fuller Field and drifted in through the open window. Somewhere, someone was winning. Here, my victim was simply running out the clock.

I tried one final time: “And did you think, after the advisory we just had about being personally accountable to your friends and teachers that it was acceptable to replace the homework—which you had taken and copied—without ever telling your friend?”

A French horn in the music practice rooms below us began its slow descent from C. It was spring, and neither of us wanted to be there.

A rhetorical question is one that begs an answer so strongly that only a dope would actually answer it. You should beware of people who ask a lot of rhetorical questions: they’re trying to keep you from thinking.

Though he had broken a rule, the student with whom I was speaking was no dope. And try as I might, I could not keep him from thinking…

So as the silence hung between the hammerer and hammeree in the wake of my litanies of did-you-think-it-was-right-to's, the tendentious yet ironclad path of rhetorical guideposts was marked. Did you think you were doing things in the Shipley way?

The student sat very still, giving every appearance of careful reflection. He looked pleasantly from me to the window.

He smiled. And then, as though eager to give me what I needed so that the two of us could cease this undignified game of cat-and-mouse, he said without a hint of a stammer, "I'm getting the gist of 'no.'"

The gist of no. The gist of no is about reproducing behaviors, acting like a trained seal—or, to return to the question that will earn you one of these powder-blue robes, the gist of no is something that schools teach when they are functioning like Xerox machines. The gist of no does not come from inside you; it is the consequence of dimly understood things-we-are-not-supposed-to-do. To the pesky student who asks, “Why?”, the answer is simply, “Because I say so.” Which is, of course, no kind of answer at all.

Not long ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Lower School Play Day. For those of you who don’t know, Play Day is an end-of-year tradition at Shipley during which students in the Pre-K to 5th grades compete at a series of unusual games and challenges.

Play Day is all about what makes phys ed the favorite subject of countless elementary school kids around the world: each new experience involves some strange game that no one has ever played before. There are orange cones and balls of all kinds, streamers that stick with Velcro to canvas belts and foam bats with rubber handles, and sometimes you scoot around on your knees or butt on a little wheeled cart. The rules are simple, and the game involves teamwork. But what’s really magical is that no one knows how to play any better than anyone else. As a consequence, you could at any moment be the hero who wins the game.

This is what I was thinking about as I watched my son and his friends go from one station to the next. Here, they had to build a tube using human supports that could carry a marble fifteen feet and drop it into a glass jar. There, they had to race in pairs, a Nerf ball pressed between the foreheads of the two racers.

It occurred to me as I watched these tests of skill, that we don’t get enough of this sort of experience as we get older. We become very clear about who’s good at what and who’s not, and most especially (and unfortunately, I think) we develop pretty settled notions about what we ourselves can and can’t do.

I was thinking about this as I watched a relay race around a series of cones with green and blue rubber chickens for batons. And as I watched, the rubber chickens were raced around the course, each time with unstinting passion, yet somehow—and here, I must note the subtle, but important role of Mr. Duncan, the teacher who in this moment was stoking these transformative fires—each lap produced a tie.

Finally, it was down to two last contestants: a smallish girl in a Green Lantern t-shirt and a physically imposing boy in a blue soccer jersey. Each grabbed the chicken as though it was the last rubber chicken in the known universe and ran with single-minded intensity. The small group of 3rd graders went wild: cheering, leaping, and waving their limbs for the two competitors.

Rather than telling you who won, I want to tell you about what struck me as beautiful about Play Day: the serious attention and absolute dedication the kids devoted to each activity, because in this moment of their lives, in the last days of 3rd grade, each kid still believed that he or she could be the hero, the one whose performance would win it all for the team. Not only that, but the kids believed it about each other. What life tends to do to us over time is it gets us to stop at one of its stations, to linger because we think we can master the particular activity. We stay in one place or another, and we decide that this or that activity is what we’re going to be good at, and in doing so, we leave the other activities to other people, people who we perceive are better suited to hopping around in potato sacks or pressing Nerf balls between their foreheads.

The thing is, when that happens, we’ve given up on something very important. We’ve decided that we’re going to forego the possibility of a transformation, the possibility that we might become, just for a moment, the hero who is changed by circumstances into someone far more powerful, someone far greater, than he or she was just moments before. We have traded the possibility of the phone booth for relative certainty of the copying machine.

So how do we retain that sense of what’s possible? I think it has to do with what we believe of one another. Third graders know that when it’s your turn, you go flat out. And when it’s not, you cheer until you’re out of breath for whoever’s turn it is. This is another important truth that as we grow, we somehow forget: people do better when they have a rooting section. They do better when they are loved.

So Class of 2006, the question comes back to you… Reproduction or transformation? Are you copies of what went before? Or are you something new? Have you made of Shipley a Xerox machine or a phone booth?

Having spent four years with all of you, I think the answer is that you are something new. I believe that your transformations have come in countless ways: in the classroom and on the stage, on the athletic field and through the many hours of service that you have logged, to name just a few. But in the end, what has truly changed you—and you have each changed one another—is this thing that Maria Stroup spoke about last night, this capacity that every 3rd grader understands instinctively, but somehow we forget as we grow older. I’m talking about the ability to love and be loved.

I want to close by returning to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, which was one of our readings last night at Baccalaureate. Paul writes:

If I give away all, and I deliver my body to be burned, but I have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.

Paul is advising the Corinthians how to live in a community that deals in transformations. And Class of 2006, lest you leave here without anything resembling last coherent thoughts, I give you these (with apologies to Paul):

Love never leaves home without its cape. When the going gets tough, love finds a phone booth. Love asks no rhetorical questions and is never satisfied with the gist of no. Love is not afraid to make the leap from the sofa; love hops in the potato sack until it falls down breathless; love grabs the rubber chicken and runs like the wind. Love jumps up and down when it gets excited; love cheers for its friends without self consciousness. And love knows that at any moment things could take a dramatic turn for the better.

Love can do these things, Class of 2006, because love transforms. You can, too, and I pray that all of you will.

Thank you.