God is no captious sophister eager to trip us up whenever we say amiss, but a courteous tutor ready to amend what, in our weakness or our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright.

— Richard Hooker, Anglican priest, March 1554 – 3 November 1600

I have heard a number of different speakers at graduation exercises and most if not all have made the point that commencement is not so much the end of something as the beginning of something: the beginning of the real business of life, they are apt to say, of the moment when you start putting into practice the ancient truths and pieties that education has been trying to instill in you all these years.

But this is a baccalaureate sermon so I am not bound by any of the conventions and can start out by saying that tomorrow’s commencement is also the end of something — Thanks be to God! — that the month of June is not only the threshold of a new summer, a new beginning, but that it is also a time of goodbyes. For underclassmen it is just goodbye until September of course, but the goodbyes that you seventy-five seniors say can be goodbyes for years to come or maybe even forever. And for the benefit of any jaded seniors who think forever is not half long enough, let me remind you that in the end there is something a little sad and a little fateful about the end of anything, even something that you are fed up with and eager to leave, because deep down any goodbye there is something of the last goodbye of all.

What I am saying about graduating can also be said about any given moment of our lives because every new moment we come to no matter how trivial it may look is the end, the goal, to which all of our earlier moments have been leading. The sermon that I am preaching to you this evening is the product of everything that I have said and done and been up to this point, just as your reaction to it is the product of everything that you have said and done and been. From moment to moment we are constantly creating ourselves, you and I, and we are also creating our future, our destinies. We are responsible for who we are and for who we are becoming, and life will hold us responsible, so be careful. Be careful.

I don’t suppose a parent has ever put someone they love on a train without saying, just before the whistle blows and the cars start to move out, “Take care of yourself, take care.” This is part of the language of goodbyes. And since in some measure I’ve been given the privilege at this moment to speak to you on behalf of the Saint Andrew’s family, this address is a goodbye to you. So I say to you now, Take care of yourselves, and in just this sense: know, recognize the terrible and wonderful freedom you have to become almost any kind of person you want to become. And then, once you recognize this freedom, be careful not to give it away too unthinkingly.

What I mean is that when you choose to become a certain kind of person, to follow a certain way of life, to enter a certain profession, by that very choice you cancel out a number of other possible choices. In other words, if you choose to become a surgeon, say, you pretty much give up the possibility of becoming a concert pianist because you have only so much time and energy, and you cannot be in two places at once. You have to choose between them, and the price that you pay for one is the giving up of the other. This is inevitable and it is also obvious, but sometimes the price that your choice costs is just as inevitable but not so obvious, and this is where you have to be so careful with your life.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Suppose that you decide in your freedom that what you want to become most is a successful businessman. First of all, on the same obvious level, that decision immediately limits your freedom to become lots of other things, an actor, for instance, or a psychiatrist. But that is all right, because you are not keen on acting or psychiatry anyway, so this is a price you’re willing to pay for your choice.

All right. But suppose you want to become a successful businessman in a community that, like all communities, has some very definite ideas about the way people are supposed to behave. It is equally obvious that in order to succeed in this place you are going to have to adapt yourself to this code of behavior. And what does that involve?

First of all, there is the whole realm of the relatively trivial — the way you speak, the way you dress, the kind of house you live in, the car you drive and so forth. If your ambition is to become a partner in a conservative law firm, for example, you do not show up for work wearing a nose-ring and a poncho, and you do not speak like a character out of Jack Kerouac. But after all, you do not really care that much about what kind of clothes you wear, and you would not know how to speak like a character out of Jack Kerouac even if you wanted to, so here is another price, another limitation of your freedom, that is certainly fair enough.

But then suppose that the community which you have chosen to succeed in has some rather strong prejudices in matters a good deal less trivial than dress. The chances are that they are kept discreetly out of sight, but it is nonetheless very apparent indeed that if you really want to get ahead here, you just do not try to sell your house to a devout Muslim when you move into a bigger place yourself.

Here of course the problem can become a little stickier, especially if the Muslim you would like to sell your house to is a good man and a good friend who really needs that house. Or even if he is not, to succeed in this community means that you have just got to shut yourself off to a whole world of potential friends, people who are interested in the same kinds of things that you are, who laugh at the same kind of nonsense, who are hurt by the same kind of callousness and are different only ideologically. You may not like it very much, but if success here is what you are after more than anything else, then this is another part of the price that you have to pay: the giving up of the freedom to choose your own friends.

And if success at any cost is what you are really after, it can get even more expensive than that. Because what does it actually mean if you choose as your primary goal in life to advance yourself, whether in business, medicine, music or what have you? It means that to the degree to which you are dedicated to that goal — and there is not one of us who is not dedicated to it in some measure — you use anything that comes your way as a means of achieving it, and that includes other human beings.

If someone stands in the way of my self-advancement, if he wants the same job that I want, I eliminate him by fair means if I am able but by foul if I am not. If someone is a Muslim whose friendship becomes a handicap to me in the world where I am trying to get ahead, I drop him as a friend. If someone is in a position to give me the power that I want, then I disguise myself to look and act and speak as much like the kind of person whom I think they will find endearing as I can. In other words, I use them for my own ends. But there is one thing that always happens when you use other people. There is an inevitable price for using them: you lose your freedom to be yourself with them.

I should make something clear here by the way. Up to here I have been speaking about using other people to advance yourself in your profession or your status in the community because that is one of the most obvious forms it takes. But of course there are a great many less obvious forms as well. Take the matter of sex, for instance. On the one hand the sexual relationship between man and woman can be the ultimately creative expression of a love in which each loses yet at the same time finds themselves in the other. Yet it is also true that human sexuality more than perhaps any other aspect of our nature can lead someone to use another person for his own self-gratification. And instead of being creative this is extremely destructive both for the one who is used and for the one who uses because it is an inexorable law of human nature that you cannot dehumanize another person without at the same time dehumanizing yourself.

And if sex can be a form of using people in the interests of self, so can a parent’s love for a child — and this is possibly more dangerous because it is much more apt to be considered respectable and much less apt to be fully conscious. I mean a mother’s clasping her child so closely to her in order to ease the pain of her own loneliness that the child’s emotional growth is retarded, or a father’s loving his son not for the sake of his son but as an extension of his own ego.

But the one thing that is always to one degree or another involved in using people, whatever form it takes, is that you can never afford to open your heart to the person whom you are using. You can never risk letting that person know you fully, because the moment you do so the game is up. And yet you want to be known; you want to be known and accepted for what you really are more, perhaps, than you want anything else in the world.

So your dedication to your own self-advancement separates you from the people you exploit just as decisively as it does from the people you alienate and the friends you drop. And, mark this: it also separates you from yourself. It separates you from yourself in just the sense that with the people you use, you can never be fully yourself but have to pretend to be someone else, and the more people you are using the more places this is so until finally you are not really yourself anywhere.

And then one of two things happens. One possibility is that you lose track of who you really are. One of the trademarks of our age is the person who has lost his identity — who for the sake of success or maybe just for the sake of security has spent so much time trying to become like what he believes people want that he can no longer be sure who he really is. Or the other possibility (and maybe this is worse): you do not lose track of your real identity, but behind the mask you wear, you grow lonely and stunted and anxious in your own isolation.

In both cases, one crucial paradox emerges. The more zealously you are dedicated to the cause of advancing yourself, the less self you have to advance. The more people you use, the less people you can love, because to love a person for herself is exactly the opposite of using her for yourself. Yet to love and be loved is a yearning even more profound than the yearning to advance, to gratify, to secure the self. As Jesus said, “He who seeks to save his soul will lose it.”

So be careful with your precious lives. Be careful not to give away your terrible and wonderful freedom unthinkingly. Be careful especially not to give away your freedom to be yourselves, to see yourselves fulfilled as the human beings God wants you to be. Be careful when you choose the road that you will follow to be aware of all the other roads you will no longer be able to follow.

Henry James is remembered as a great writer, but it was something he said to his nephew Billy, the son of his brother William, as he was putting Billy on a train at Penn Station in New York that Billy would spend the rest of his life remembering him by. “Billy,” he said, kissing the boy on the forehead and holding his face in his hands, “there are three things most important in life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” Of all the words to ever come from this most labyrinthine of writers these are the ones Billy always remembered.

Be kind. That is another way of saying Be careful. Be kind to yourself. Be kind to others. Do not live just for yourself, not simply because to do so is wrong but because to do so is death. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself not simply because to do so is right but because to do so is life.

I smell like a charcoal-grilled hamburger. My feet have been close to a fire at the youth house with Aaron, talking with David and Anna Hirsch while David flipped burgers and awaited the arrival of the fifty students who are there now for their weekly Tuesday cookout. David is that precious gem hard to find in the Church: an excellent youth minister. “The kingdom of heaven,” Jesus said, “is like a merchant in search of fine pearls who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.” He might just as well have said that the kingdom of heaven is like a church seeking a rare youth minister. Saint Francis has been richly blessed to have a Student Ministry that’s produced scores of disciples over the past eleven years, first under the leadership of Jon Price and now under David’s. I thank God for David, and for Anna, Craig Windham and Betsy Harrison. They help me and my children keep the bloody faith.

Let me get a little philosophical about the teaching of religion. If the adjective ‘religious’ is taken to mean possessed of certain virtues such as faithfulness, compassion, integrity, humility, self-understanding, and self-discipline, you cannot teach people to be religious. If the noun ‘religion’ is taken to denote that area of human experience in which people encounter the Reality behind reality as a power which both judges and to their flourishing transforms them, you cannot teach religion.

To the extent that God is One whom we can never make the object of our speculation without to one degree or another reducing God to a god fashioned in our own image; to the extent that God can never become an ‘It’ which we reach at the end of a logical demonstration of divine existence, but remains always an ‘I’ confronting us with divine imperatives at times and in ways which we cannot control; to the extent that the most profound and subtle words we use to describe God are at best the crude metaphors that a blind man must resort to when speaking of the appearance of the sun which he knows only by feeling its warmth upon him, you can never teach God as an academic subject; to the extent that the deep and crucial questions with which religion is concerned involve people in every phase and area of their lives — to speak of a philosophy of teaching people religion is a kind of absurdity.

What then is left after all these resounding negations? What is it that Hirsch and the leadership team of Student Ministries intend to do teaching your children and mine religion at Saint Francis? Only this, I think, and it is plenty: to try to convince students — even the 7th grader who already tends to look upon religion as a cumbersome and implausible irrelevance (which much of the time it is) — that it is not religion in itself that matters, but the Reality to which true religion points.

This Reality is Jesus Christ in at least a double sense. First, in the life of Jesus as a human being is made manifest human life as it was created to be, a life where all our tragic estrangement from ourselves, from others, and from God as the true center of our being is overcome in sacrificial love. Second, in the event of Jesus as the Christ — his life, death, resurrection and ascension — a power is released among us which brings us to God and recreates us in His image.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.

The New Yorker

Out of class, they keep at it. Lieutenants in Iraq who took [Elizabeth Samet’s] course three years earlier write back to ask about her current syllabus. Another stationed in Korea tells her, “Someone once told me that ‘the most important book you will ever read is the first one after your graduation.’ I wish I could remember what it was—I have done more reading since graduation than I would have ever thought possible.” Still another writes from Mosul, “I have been rolling through books here at a pretty steady clip,” and when he returns to the States, he reports, guiltily, that his reading has slipped.

Samet attributes these young people’s literary fervor precisely to their combat future. While freshmen down in Manhattan at Columbia and NYU think about jobs and paychecks they’ll secure after graduation, and hook-ups they make before it, cadets have a rigorous regimented existence in class and out, and they know they will assume command of 30 men and women when it’s over, probably in a hot zone. The prospect throws them into hard questions of life and death, duty and sacrifice, courage and leadership, and they probe great works to figure them out. Samet’s chapters ramble from episode to episode, sprinkling reflections on the war on terror, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and her own frequent place as “the Only Woman in the Room” (a chapter title), but the plebe readers are what hold the book together.

All of them, Samet included, “feel a palpable pressure to consider every moment’s practical and moral weight.” The pressure magnifies the import of Macbeth contemplating the murder of Duncan, Penelope waiting for her husband, Stevens’s “Oh! Blessed rage for order”—Samet doesn’t have to convince them to respect Shakespeare, Homer, and the rest. The war has done that already.

Mark Bauerlein, on Elizabeth Samet’s Soldier’s Heart

Thank you so very much. I feel more pleased and honored by this award than I can adequately say. I want to express my gratitude to the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation and to the Reader’s Digest Association and to all of you.

I am also deeply appreciative of the help and encouragement I’ve been given by a great many people over the years, several of whom are here tonight.

I am indebted above all, in countless ways, to my family: my mother and father, Ruth and Christian Hax McCullough, my brothers Hax, George, and James McCullough, and to my own five children, Melissa, David, Bill, Geoffrey, and Dorie, all of whom have played a part in my work and given me the best of reasons to keep working. And above all to my wife, Rosalee Barnes McCullough, editor-in-chief, mission control, strong partner, and best friend, the finest person I know. And by far the best dancer.

I am hugely indebted to an inspiring teacher, Vincent Scully of Yale; to my old friends and former fellow editors at American Heritage, Alvin Josephy and Richard Ketchum; to Peter Schwed, Dick Snyder, Michael Korda, Sophie Sorkin, Frank and Eve Metz, all of Simon & Schuster who have been my publishers from the start; and to my friend and literary agent, Morton Janklow, who has been, in recent years, one of the spirited, refreshing sides of a very different life as my work became better known, and who has given me some of the best advice I’ve had from anybody about many things besides books.

I must also thank for their shining example and friendship writers Conrad Richter, Walter Lord, Barbara Tuchman, Bruce Catton, Paul Horgan, and Wallace Stegner.

And let me include, too, how much I owe to the throbbing, steadfast city of my childhood, wartime Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and to this, the greatest of our cities, New York. Like so many of you, I couldn’t wait to get here. It was here I got my start, here I discovered that wondrous window on the world and on the nation’s past the New York Public Library, here, with the Brooklyn Bridge, that I found a story like no other.

It is seldom that anyone ever receives so handsome a tribute as I do tonight, or is offered the opportunity to address so distinguished an audience with such influence as you have on our country. So I wish to speak about something much on my mind.

We, in our time, are raising a new generation of Americans who, to an alarming degree, are historically illiterate.

The situation is serious and sad. And it is quite real, let there be no mistake. It has been coming on for a long time, like a creeping disease, eating away at the national memory. While the clamorous popular culture races on, the American past is slipping away, out of site and out of mind. We are losing our story, forgetting who we are and what it’s taken to come this far.

Warning signals, in special studies and reports, have been sounded for years, and most emphatically by the Bradley Report of 1988. Now, we have the blunt conclusions of a new survey by the Education Department: The decided majority, some 60 percent, of the nation’s high school seniors haven’t even the most basic understanding of American history. The statistical breakdowns on specific examples are appalling.

But I speak also from experience. On a winter morning on the campus of one of our finest colleges, in a lively Ivy League setting with the snow falling outside the window, I sat with a seminar of some twenty-five students, all seniors majoring in history, all honors students-the cream of the crop. “How many of you know who George Marshall was?” I asked. None. Not one.

At a large university in the Midwest, a young woman told me how glad she was to have attended my lecture, because until then, she explained, she had never realized that the original thirteen colonies were all on the eastern seaboard.

Who’s to blame? We are.

Everywhere in the country there are grade school and high school teachers teaching history who have had little or no history in their own education. Our school system, the schools we are responsible for, could rightly be charged with educational malpractice.

Can we expect some jolting national alarm to sound? Will there be in these remaining years of the 1990s some sensational event like Sputnik in the 1950s, to shock us into a realization of the true nature of the situation? Probably not.

But something must be done. And we can begin by asking a few fundamental questions.

Do we really care about standards of performance any more?

Are we read to accept the reality that in a government of the people it is not some longed-for leader who will save the day? If we’re looking for leadership, the place to look is in the mirror.

Too many teachers have little if any real understanding of what they’re teaching, let alone that vitality and passion for the subject that makes a great teacher so effective. If you think back to your own time in school, the courses you liked best and did best in were almost certainly the courses taught by the teachers you liked best. And the teachers you liked best were almost certainly those who were excited about the material and conveyed that excitement to you.

We have to start training teachers to teach history-and grade school teachers especially. We have to begin early with children. The earlier the better. We have to get back to basics. And let’s not be quite so bedazzled by the information revolution, by all the glittering promise of information highways.

Information isn’t learning. Information isn’t education. We have to have better teachers and we have to have better books.

We need better textbooks. We need more and better biographies for beginning readers. Too much of what’s written as history for our children is contrived by committee. It’s an assembly and it’s deadly. It reminds me of the old piano teacher’s lament, “I hear you play all the notes, but I hear no music.”

So why bother? “That’s history,” is the expression now. That’s done with, junk for the trash heap. Why history?

History shows us how to behave. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. History is-or should be-the bedrock of patriotism, not the chest-pounding kind of patriotism but the real thing, love of country.

At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation. Everything we have, all our great institutions, hospitals, universities, libraries, this city, our laws, our music, art, poetry, our freedoms, everything is because somebody went before us and did the hard work, provided the creative energy, provided the money, provided the belief. Do we disregard that?

Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude. It’s a form of ingratitude.

I’m convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.

What history teaches it teaches mainly by example. It inspires courage and tolerance. It encourages a sense of humor. It is an aid to navigation in perilous times. We are living now in an era of momentous change, of huge transitions in all aspects of life-here, nationwide, worldwide-and this creates great pressures and tensions. But history shows that times of change are the times when we are most likely to learn. This nation was founded on change. We should embrace the possibilities in these exciting times and hold to a steady course, because we have a sense of navigation, a sense of what we’ve been through in times past and who we are.

Think how tough our predecessors were. Think what they had been through. There’s no one in this room who hasn’t an ancestor who went through some form of hell. Churchill in his great speech in the darkest hours of the Second World War, when he crossed the Atlantic, reminded us, “We haven’t journeyed this far because we are made of sugar candy.”

Now history isn’t just good for you in a civic way. It isn’t just something you take to be a better citizen. It does do that, and that in itself would be reason enough to stress its importance. “Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free,” Jefferson said, “expects what never was and never will be.” And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it is in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.

But, I think, what it really comes down to is that history is an extension of life. It both enlarges and intensifies the experience of being alive. It’s like poetry and art. Or music. And it’s ours, to enjoy. If we deny our children that enjoyment, that adventure in the larger time among the greater part of the human experience. We’re cheating them out of a full life.

There’s no secret to making history come alive. Barbara Tuchman said it perfectly: “Tell stories.” The pull, the appeal is irresistible, because history is about two of the greatest of all mysteries-time and human nature.

How lucky we are. How lucky we are to enjoy in our work and in our lives, the possibilities, the precision and reach, the glories of the English language. How lucky we are, how very lucky we are, to live in this great country, to be Americans-Americans all.

David McCullough’s acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, 1995.