We look at the people who open fire at children in schools and we try to use language to understand them. We try to find ways to justify politics which seem totally corrupt and allows us to withdraw from politics, because only a fool, or someone deeply corrupt, would go into politics. And in fact the greatest thing that we find interesting about him is his sexual life, which we have now rendered political. We have no language to talk about how to construct the future, which we graduation speakers are supposed to tell you, the class of '98, to make better. And the process of schooling and college will be to take all those common words like freedom, justice, fairness, and humanity, and to try to show you how critically they don't mean what they are supposed to mean, that universals don't exist, that absolute ideas do not exist.
Truth becomes increasingly hard to define and to share and to communicate.
This school was built in a progressive era which connected progressiveness with progress, which believed that by trial and error, by your own experience, that progress could be made, particularly in science, where an hypothesis could be disproved and a new hypothesis brought into being. Probably the oldest text in all of educational wisdom is The Republic of Plato. At the end of The Republic in the tenth book there is the myth of Ur. Putney diploma page Graduation Speakers Putney home page.