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Alices in Our Own Wonderlands:
Learning: Aquiring Fluency in Living
Commencement Address
The Union Institute
October 7, 2001
Trustees of The Union Institute, President Sturnick, distinguished colleagues, families, friends of TUI: It is my distinct pleasure to participate in so special an event. Today , The Union Institute honors those learners assembled here who have realized one of their dreams—the dream of completing a degree from TUI. To this group of learners I extend my heartiest congratulations on the occasion of so significant an accomplishment. Bravo! I congratulate you especially because you have demonstrated the courage and perseverance necessary to realize this dream. Whatever the challenge, you have responded with fortitude and purpose, with determination and persistence, with strength and resolution—with all that is excellent in you. And today, you are here. You have learned well and have demonstrated the quality of that learning. I congratulate you.
In the life of a University, there are events--ceremonies, rituals--such as this one. These events are significant in many ways. Certainly, it is appropriate and necessary for us to pause to recognize those who have achieved through a continued striving for excellence. They are themselves exemplars for those still striving. In learning more about The Union Institute, I read that its purpose is "...to provide educational opportunities and services of exemplary quality to diverse adult populations with distinct and varied needs in terms of content and delivery systems. It actively seeks to identify and reach those underserved by higher education." I salute you, further, not only for the accomplishment, but also for the striving and for the commitment--for having afforded yourselves fully of the unique opportunity of TUI. Events such as this one also provide opportunities for reflection, reassessment, and reaffirmation. The events of the past month have shifted our "centers," prompting all kinds of change in each of us. I have started and re-started these remarks at least four times, searching for what felt most appropriate for me to say to you today. If I may this morning, I would like to speak about four concepts—concepts consistent with and implicit in TUI’s purpose: 1) a firm sense of life as an imperative base for achievement; 2) a posture of readiness toward making one’s self a more complete human being; 3) service as an essential element in one's lifelong learning; and 4) the necessity for a preparedness for change.
1. A Firm Sense of Life as an Imperative Base for Achievement:
I shall be uncharacteristically and personally anecdotal in discussing the first concept (a firm sense of life as an imperative base for achievement). So, please bear with me. I call this "Lessons from a son." Over a 4 month period some 10 years ago, 6 separate accidents affected the lives of a group of 6 young people who had started kindergarten together and were then about to graduate from high school. Of the six, our son is the only one still alive—his was the third of the 6 accidents. He said to us some time during those traumatizing months that followed that he knew he needed to find a purpose to his life if he were to go on living. He described having lain in his bed in the dark for more than a day, going over in chronological order and in minute detail each moment of his life from his earliest recollections, searching for purpose. He said he found it in the recalled moments that had given him the most joy. He said those were the moments when he was either doing something to improve his own life or the lives of those around him. Purpose. The rather recent (and accident-related) occurrence of the complete loss of sight in one eye, after nearly a decade of efforts of trying to repair and maintain his body as well as his spirit, has necessitated a reaffirmation of purpose: he said, "It is a loss, Mom,... and it needs to be grieved as losses must, but I have already passed that test...I have already learned to live life again and to love living it. Sure there will be difficult times and dark moments, but I will not allow those moments to overcome the accomplishment of learning to love living again." Lessons from a son.
This lesson brought into clearer relief several earlier and very poignant experiences that have continued to affect me fundamentally. During the 1980's while traveling and working in many places in Asia, I had a series of unusual experiences, which served to heighten my sensitivities about LIFE:
meeting and listening to the first-hand experiences of Rear Admiral Al Maier, the senior surviving officer of the USS Thompson, which sank in Sunda Straits in 1942, taking the lives of nearly 1400 sailors (he was instrumental in starting our Prisoners of War office); and, later, remembering what it felt like standing on the Arizona War Memorial and seeing the still-leaking oil from below; and being in the Punch Bowl that June after the Challenger accident and seeing on the grave of Astronaut Ellison Onizuka the little bouquets and drawings that his children had brought to wish him "Happy Birthday;"
going to the US cemetery in Manila—the second largest US cemetery—with its acres of crosses and stars of David...and the two black marble hemispheres on which are etched the names of all those whose bodies were lost at sea;
motoring across the South China Sea in a lawn mower-engine-powered banca boat from Manila Bay to Corregidor with its overgrown battlements still in evidence.....once there, going a few feet into Malinta Tunnel and into the "mile-long barracks" on whose outer walls are etched the names and serial numbers of the men who knew they were going to die.....and walking the length of that barracks, letting my fingertips be instructed by their lives, I felt connected to lives lost, yet living still;
following the route of the Bataan Death March from Mount Sumat to the dense perimeter of Clark Air Base, where the Negritos, who had assisted the Allies so reliably, still lived...all, in the 1990's, destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Pinatuba;
walking through the Asin Wood-carving village isolated in the mountains near Baguio in the Philippines... talking to the little children—some attached to mothers by a swaddling cloth, others playing in the dirt—while their parents freed exquisite figures from the wood they chiseled—all to be destroyed in the earth quake of the following year;
walking a short distance onto the bridge over the River Kwai...behind me a small preserved Quonset hut of the "Joeth" (Death) Camp containing memorabilia of the prisoners who struggled and died there and the three small cemeteries where they rest.....and in front of me in the distance, the hills of, then, Burma, now Kalimantan, though I didn’t know at the time that civil war had just broken out there.
Life and its living can be fragile, can’t it? I believe our awareness of its power also to instruct and inform augments our ability to move forward, make progress, to achieve generally. I call it intentional living.
I urge you to hold inviolate a firm sense of life as an imperative base for your next achievements.
2. A Posture of Readiness Toward Making One’s Self a More Complete Human Being
The second concept I want to discuss is a posture or attitude of readiness toward making of one's self a more complete human being. I believe that we in education have a responsibility to encourage in learners the most favorable posture we can for their integration of knowledge and information and for their acquisition of the knowledge, skills, and competencies necessary for the development of the individual and society. To accomplish this task we must provide for learners ample and purposeful opportunities to develop and to test developing hypotheses and to encourage an advocacy of the notion that a part has coherent meaning only in the context of "the whole." If what we desire for learners is a sustained and productive response to order in flux, then we must stress the plurality of the foundations of knowledge and the diverse angles of refraction on ways of knowing. Becoming a more complete human being means being prepared sufficiently to contribute, to respond with sensitivity and creativity, and to resist the lure of the rigidly familiar. It means allowing dimensions of difference to emerge as components essential to formulations of new orders.
3. Service as an Essential Component in One’s Life’s Learning
We must come to understand service as an essential element in one's life’s learning: we believe that service is not just giving back to society--though it is that, too; rather it is an essential element of The Union Institute’s mission. I quote, in part: TUI "...seeks to graduate lifelong learners with a strong sense of self and community, cognizant of the obligation to share the talents, values, and opportunities afforded by their education." It is our challenge in universities to represent the belief of the integration of theory and practice in pursuit of a greater good in daily routines through programs (curricular and co-curricular) and practices with all our constituents--not as a way of being accountable and responsive to public opinion, but because it is fitting...and right...and because the lived through experience of service bestows to our persons the full currency of the human phenomenon.
4. Preparedness for Change
Now to illustrate a preparedness for change (I have been rather serious so far; allow me now to be at once serious and more whimsical, as you shall see): on occasions such as this one, it is often customary to address the topic of learning, giving special attention to its role in one’s own life. I shall continue that tradition today beginning with the questions: What do we mean by learning? What characterizes learning? What happens to us when we learn?
If I polled each of you here, I suspect that your responses to those questions would be phrased differently but would suggest some commonalities. You would tell me that learning is acquiring or getting something; that it involves the retention of information or a skill; that it implies storage systems, memory, cognitive organization; that it involves an active, conscious focus on events outside of one's self; that it is relatively permanent, but subject to forgetting; that it involves some form of practice--perhaps reinforced practice; that learning is a change in behavior. And I would agree with you that all of those attributes characterize learning and its effects on us as learners.
We are here today in recognition of your demonstrated propensity to learn. It represents for you today a significant academic accomplishment--an accomplishment that attests to a certain intellectual ability as well as the ability to articulate what you have first comprehended, then analyzed, synthesized, and evaluated.
Our lives, however, extend beyond the boundaries of the baccalaureate—even the masters, and doctoral experiences. We live in and through the interstices of distinct, yet cumulative experiences. The quality of that living is in some measure contingent upon our preparedness to continue to learn...to change our behaviors throughout our lives...to acquire what I call a fluency in living.
A Fluency in Living. Because language acquisition and the nature of language are part of my disciplinary profile, it is sometimes instructive to me to apply what I know about the principles of natural language acquisition to contexts not typically regarded as linguistic. To wit: We know that the acquisition of each new language skill is a gradual process; it is a process of mastering many language skills simultaneously; we know that we learn how to speak a first language without learning about that language; we learn to understand and use language by hearing and later using it in situations that make meaning clear; we know, too, that a language learner follows the linguistic norms of the individual or group with whom he or she wishes to identify. This knowledge allows me to be more patient with my ever-developing fluency in living. It encourages in me a willingness to engage simultaneity rather than to insist primarily on quantifying discrete bits of isolated information as the "way of knowing." It urges me to take the risks required by creative acts of the imagination--to guess what is yet unspoken, unseen. It exhorts me to discover secrets still obscured in complexity as much as it reminds me to place into coherent sequence that which everybody already knows.
Your accomplishment celebrated here today is significant. It is insufficient, however, for the full awarenesses we must bring to the intellectual, social, spiritual, and philosophical consequences of our lives.
Let me illustrate what I mean with the promised "whimsical:" I have entitled my remarks today: "Alices in Our Own Wonderlands: Learning: Acquiring Fluency in Living." One of my favorite pieces of literature is Alice in Wonderland. You will recall from the chapter, "The Queen's Croquet-Ground," that Alice felt particularly challenged by the environment in that chapter:
(Read selected portions–as time permits--of Chapter 8, QC-G,pages 111-112)
Alice demonstrates certain attributes and employs critical strategies throughout this chapter--attributes and strategies that ensure a prepared mind to engage fully the next moment--no matter how challenging.
As has Alice, we, too, at one time or another have felt beset with a din of images and harassed by data of all denominations. But just as Alice remains flexible and adaptable, and trusts in the fundamental connectedness of things, so must we acquire (learn) whatever we need in order to arrange bewildering fragments of thought and experience into at least a more plausible, if not a more intelligible design. This commitment to a capacity for lifelong learning and fluency establishes the essential context of a presiding sensibility, without which the whole seems too much of a random miscellany. If learning entails acquisition and the change that goes with acquiring something different--something other, then what is required is a fundamental trust in the connectedness of our own experiences--of the anticipated order as well as the erratic chaos.
No matter that the croquet balls were really hedgehogs and that the croquet mallet was really a flamingo, Alice managed...and learned. She sought the knowledge she needed; she was flexible and adaptable; she approached what she did with a certain preparedness of mind; she believed in the fundamental connectedness of things (Arnold Schoenberg: "...dissonances are but distant consonances."); she was committed to the "exemplary;" and she cared about and shared what she had to offer.
Learning is active; it is transitive; it can be reflexive and reciprocal; it illumines. Learning is the language of life and its living.
The role of learning in my life has been and continues to be central to the creation of coherence, to the negotiation of meaning. Through learning I fortify my courage to dream--not merely to plan; through learning I ensure that my aspirations and ideals will continue to hold their shape in the dissolving images of yesterday's news. Through learning I am able better to participate in...to contribute to the texture and illumination of (what Julia Kristeva calls) life's "mosaic of citations." I believe we must attend to our physical, psychological, philosophical, intuitive, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional selves. Attention to this totality of ourselves clarifies purpose and connectedness to life. As each of us pursues something of value, we inspire others with our model. Remember, reciprocity is essential to the dynamic of lifelong learning and achieving. Others, in turn, strive and accomplish and inspire us in return.
To summarize the four essential concepts:
1. A firm sense of life as an imperative base for achievement;
2. A posture of readiness toward making one’s self a more complete human being;
3. Service as an essential element in one’s lifelong learning because it is fitting, because it is right, and because it bestows the full currency of the human phenomenon;
4. And, the necessity for a preparedness for change.
Let me end here with this entreaty to us all: may we all commit to strive to be better than we are so that we may serve more effectively; we will envision goals; affirm values; motivate ourselves and others; take the necessary risks; manage the outcomes; and renew ourselves and the process of our lifelong learning and serving.
I congratulate you and salute you, your families, and your professors on this your distinguished accomplishment. And may this one be just one of the dreams realized throughout your lives of learning.
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