There’s a quote I’d like to read from your philosophy statement, and I’m sure you’ve heard it, but it cannot be repeated too often.  It says this:

“Our philosophy is based on the assumption that all people of all ages are intrinsically valuable and naturally curious and want to learn at their own pace and in their own way.”

In another of your structural documents titled "PARTICIPANT GUIDELINES TO STAFF EXPECTATIONS," the number one item, on the first page, is TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOURSELF.  Now that’s kind of an extraordinary idea in education.

I just had the experience of working with the U.S. Office of Education and in doing so have had the opportunity to work with teachers from 180 teachers’ colleges around the country.  We held a series of symposia in St. Louis.  The first of those was one at which I got up in front of a group such as this which was scheduled to assemble at a particular time, about 2 o’clock in the afternoon on the first day, and I didn’t do anything.   Now, I didn’t do anything for an extraordinarily long time.  I smoked about nine cigarettes, read some notes, had conversations with various of my colleagues.  Forty-five minutes of just sitting in a chair like you are in an auditorium with nothing happening when something was scheduled to be happening is an extraordinarily long time -- I think it’s about three years altogether.  The extraordinary thing about it is that in none of those symposia with none of those teachers from 180 colleges from around the country has anybody come up yet and said, “Hey, let’s start doing something,” and not yet have they started doing something before they started doing anything.  That’s really interesting when you stop to think about it, because they came there to be taught.  They said, “Here we are.  Do it!”

We’re beginning to understand today that life and learning is not having to do with being done.  It has to do with doing for yourself, with taking responsibility for one’s own learning, for one’s own growth, and that’s what you’ve been doing here.  It’s a very exciting kind of experience.  I am almost frightened to see as many of you being graduated today going out into the world with the idea that you can take responsibility for your own learning.  That’s in a sense where you’ve been.  Where you’re going is into a new world.  We come out of a world of unbridled optimism, living in a place that has a lot of fat on the carcass, going into a world with a lot of new difficulties, a lot of new discoveries about how things are connected with each other.

When I was back in school, if we wanted to demonstrate that what somebody said was particularly irrelevant, we’d say, “Well, what does that have to do with the price of eggs in China?”  Well, everybody would laugh!  Now we’re finding out it does.  Practically everything does.  It’s a kind of a new world in the sense of the way we’re interconnected and the way we’re interdependent on each other, and I think that (American) flag means a lot in that ours was not a war of independence, it was a war of interdependence.  We were not saying, “Here we stand alone and want to be cut off from everybody.  What we want to do is be part of the action and we want to take responsibility for ourselves.”