Each of you must feel, in some crucial sense, very much on your own today. From now on, what happens will be as a result of your choices. From now on, you are responsible for what becomes of you. And because you are privileged, because your education confers on you a certain access to power in this society, what you say and do, what you become, will have an added force. Today, your responsibilities deepen.
Education is a curious thing.
We derive it from the Latin, e-ducere, to lead out. In some sense one is being led out of childhood, the extended childhood that is a mark of the western democracies in our time. One is also being led out of a presumed ignorance, into the light of learning. The model this etymology suggests is essentially authoritarian, it presumes a settled society, a certain naivety on the part of the student, a certain possession of learning on the part of the teacher, a chain of transmission, and therefore transformation, linking both. I am not so sure that this model holds in the present day.