Wow! I am really excited to be here with you today. And it's really an honor because right now, as you graduate, you are allowing me to share with you some very particular special times with you and your family, not just your biological family, but your family, your community in spirit.
And even though I still get the willies whenever I say “Berkeley,” but that's okay. I am really proud of what happens in California and what is happening here today. When I was coming and wanted and was asked to be the speaker, I had to try to figure out what I was going to talk about.
A lot of what I was going to talk about has already been said, but that's okay. I'm going to repeat some of it. But the first thing I want to say is congratulations.
Congratulations to the University of California, Berkeley School of Education 2024 graduates. Dean Young, faculty, alumni, parents, guest and privilege and graduates, I am so privileged to be with you today. And again, thank you for allowing me to share with you this very special day.
The graduates of this school have the most critical, impactful, pivotal work to do today and the years to come. That's in the world. Your work, education and all its forms are foundational to everything we are everything we will become to society. Now, this is a statement of fact. This isn't just because I want to say it. This is a statement of fact.
And today, I want to talk with you a little bit about my thoughts and ideas about education. What I've learned in the world about education, and just some things that I've been thinking about. And I'm going to use, to formulate some of these quotes from three remarkable women from Alabama that, anchor my comments. Each one of these women are a little offset from the other, but their views of the world, their lives have impacted me greatly. And I'll let you know when I come to them.
But first, let me share with you a little bit more of my educational pedigree, a little bit more than we said. Things you need to know about me. I was born in Alabama at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. I'm the youngest of three children, and my, older sister is a child and adolescent psychiatrist. So that tells you something about what happened to me as I was growing up.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago during the 1960s. My mother was a schoolteacher in the Chicago Public Schools for over 25 years. I went to what may have been classified it as, one time or another, some of the best and the worst schools in the United States. Whether it was Chicago Public Schools, Stanford University, Cornell, as you said, or, thinking about places where I taught. I taught at Dartmouth College as an environmental studies professor. And yes, I taught health care to Peace Corps volunteers in Sierra Leone and Liberia and self-care for asthma, patients in a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand.
I started the international science camp, The Earth We Share science camp, which was about science literacy, to train teachers. I sat on public boards. I had to learn about the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. Astronaut training was another learning and educational experience. And going back, learning how to be on public boards, business plans, all of these are part of education, and just living in the world every day. Because we have to remember, education doesn't just happen when we tell people to pay attention when they're sitting in classrooms.
Education happens all the time. What we see around us, and that's also what we have to deal with when we're formally training people. What did I get for my formal education? Well, I got facts and basic skills and, knowledge about mathematics, science, history, all of those kinds of things. But what I mainly got that I think is particularly important as I went to public schools and other places, was socialization. Learning how to interact with lots of different people from different places. That was critically important.
And the main thing I learned comes from a Yoruba proverb that says, “even the sharpest blade can't cut its own handle.” You see, I was a pretty bright little girl, but there's no way that I could live up to my potential, to my ambitions, without the help of teachers and others. You see, that's what this is about. We have this incredible set of potentials in everyone in the world. But they become useful, they become able to develop by the support that we give them, the support that the world provides to us.
Now, I think someone said graduation is a transition from one time to another. So I'm going to move on. But here's the thing: the world that you're transitioning in, I know that some of you been out in the world, some of people who were getting master’s or graduate degrees, you've already been out in the world. But I just have to say something about the world you're getting into.
Here's deal: The good news and the bad news is that so much of what's going on in the world today, in the vast, vast majority of the severe challenges that are shaking the world today, are due to the choices we humans have made. Our actions. And like it or not, most of us on this stage, in this audience, or those graduating today, in this country will have an outsized role in what happens next.
Now here's the good news. The good news is that we get to choose, and every day we get a choice. The bad news is, is that we can choose, and we do so every day, but often by habit or rote. And we do that while telling ourselves, “you know, I, I individually maybe I can't make a difference,” you know, or “everyone else is doing it, so I might as well benefit from it too.”
Let me give you a little survey where we are today. We're in this paradox between, things that seem like we have rather we have a paradoxical world where it seems like there are too many things going on or. Okay, this is example abundance and scarcity. We are living in a time in this world where we have more knowledge, more capabilities than any other time in human history.
We have more resources at our disposal, yet we're operating on an idea of scarcity where we don't think everyone can participate or have the ability to share in this bounty. We're in a world with fear and want. Right. There's a paradox. We want to help others, but we're afraid of people. We have swings of the most insular behaviors, where people want to just sort of sit on the side and say, “I just want to keep all of this to myself. I don't want anybody to really push me in terms of my thoughts and ideas.”
And we're afraid sometimes to just hear another thought or another way of looking at things. Why? I don't know. Because it's from those perspectives that we get to move forward. And in the world, I see an amazing amount of hope as well. And one of those things was hope that we’ve dealt with, you know what we're seeing around the college campuses this year, this year.
So I grew up in the 1960s and I wasn't an actual hippie. I wasn't quite old enough to be a hippie. I was sort of wanna-be growing up. But what I saw around me was a world that was changing rapidly, and that people were declaring their right to participate, their right to determine where the world goes. It wasn't anarchy. It was just a desire to change the systems.
What I see this year, when people are talking about student protests, whichever way they are, it's about students being aware and awake and knowing what's happening in the world, in some kind of way. The word being awake has become a bad thing.
I ask you not to sleep your way through life. That's not what we want to do. The wicked truth is, is that we have so much more to do in this world. People have been caring about the world. It's okay to care. In fact, it's important that we have empathy and that we care about things.
Now, I heard that we, you know, we started off a number of people with during the Covid pandemic, right. And we had to do things back and forth during classes. But here's the thing about Covid that I thought was really very interesting. The pandemic made us reexamine what jobs are actually essential in this world. We found out that agriculture workers, health care workers, grocery store cashiers and staff, first responders and teachers and evidently people who make toilet paper are essential.
You know, the other part of this, we got on a first name being based name basis with corona and viruses and all of this kind of thing. I had a friend of mine call me from New York who would never talk about statistics and viruses, and she was talking about all the stats and things like that.
But here's the other piece: Corona also prompted many people to confess, not only am I not smarter than a fifth grader, but kindergartners are kind of rough and should be taught by experts. This is a time where we said we were really happy to have teachers and educators there, and then we started to forget again.
Our educational outcome and our system must educate students and citizens to be resilient, think critically, and be able to encounter different viewpoints. Some of those which may depart radically from what we want to hear. We have to be able to emerge on the other side whole, having been able to maintain a strong moral compass with our integrity intact and evolved enough to communicate ideas in a manner appropriate to the circumstances, and to take actions that are beneficial to our entire world.
Now. When I think about this, a lot of what we've been seeing in the world is belligerent ignorance. That is, I don't want to learn anything else. I know everything I know. My perspective is the only one that's reasonable. But it's not just perspective. It's how we see the world is what we share.
Now, my first Alabama quote is from Zora Neale Hurston, who was, an anthropologist in the 1940s. And she said, “truth is a letter from courage.” And she also said, that “the present was an egg that was laid by the past, with the future inside its shell.” So today, what we're doing and what you're teaching right now is going to impact that future. So every day we need to be putting our best foot forward so that the future will be one that's very hopeful, but also that will make the present better.
My second quote is from Helen Keller, also from Alabama. She said, science has found no remedy for the worst evil of them all: the apathy of human beings. Human apathy toward one another is outrageous, and we show it all the time these days. Human apathy towards one another is outrageous, but perhaps it's recoverable. However, the apathy displayed on an ongoing basis daily of how globally, an apathy toward how globally our lives and our well-being are inextricably connected and woven into the fabric of this planet Earth and connected to the greater universe, that apathy is belligerently suicidal.
I say that because that connectedness is not a choice. It's reality. It's a reality.
Y'all know me because space, right in the cute orange flight suit picture. But the reality is, is that we cannot go anywhere in this universe without taking the Earth with us. And for tens of generations to come, the vast, vast majority of humans will live on this planet. And so we have to understand that relationship that we have to this planet. We have choices, real choices to use our science, our resources, and our potential to help this planet.
You all may have seen the United Nations sustainable development goals, right? They have things like, increased biodiversity, education for girls, clean water for everyone. And there's nothing on that list, I'd ask you to look at it. Look at it sometime. There's nothing on that list that we do not know how to do right now. But yet we make choices every day that start to ensure that we're not going to be able to make it past the tipping point where the climate is going to change so radically that our food sources are going to be compromised and our food sources start in the oceans. Yet the real choice is we have we squander them in the guise of clever economic schemes, business urgencies, greed and selfishness.
So y'all don't know, think I'm skirting around this, I know about space. So when people talk about space very frequently, they look at it as some kind of way, something that is antithetical or that it takes away from the rest of our society. And then if I start to take a talk about interstellar space, like that's going from our solar system to another star, which has nothing to do with going to the moon except for, you know, some of the environments are the same, but the distances are so great that it's like nothing that we've ever done.
You may have heard of Voyager, which was launched in 1977. I think the Voyagers are the coolest things we've ever done. Voyager has been traveling on over 35,000 mph since 1977, and it has just left our solar system. And if you were to look at it like between going from our the sun to our closest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri, and you thought about that distance as the distance from Los Angeles to New York City, Voyager would have only gone one mile. It would take Voyager 50,000 years to get to another solar system, to get to Alpha Centauri.
So it's completely different. That's what excited me so much about it. Because for me, it represents everything, everything we need to do to achieve interstellar capabilities. I'm not trying to launch the U.S.S. Enterprise, but I'm trying to make sure that we have the capabilities for human interstellar flight within 100 years, because all of those capabilities are required for what we need to survive in this world. We have to be able to create lots more energy. It has to be through fission, which we do now breaking atoms apart. But we have to be able to store and control it and do it safely. Our fusion, which powers the sun, which we really don't know how to do. I know some folks here at Berkeley kind of close, but we don't know how to do it well.
Our anti-matter, which, yes, nanomatter is real. And even though it's powering, the Starship Enterprise. But anti-matter, each one of those is a step above what we have in order of magnitude more of what we can create with energy this way. We have to look at behavior economics to be able to invest for things over a long period of time. We have to understand the microbiome in our body. We need to understand education and how do we contribute to this world.
And then the other part of going interstellar, is that we're going someplace that we don't know where 90% of it is dark. Think about it. Yeah. And again, I know I'm at Berkeley and people said, we know about dark matter, dark energy, but really all the physicist friends is sort of a fudge factor that we have in place to make our equations work out. But isn't that like going into the future? So much of it is dark. We don't know what it is, but if we carry some principles with us, it makes a difference.
Those differences that it makes, if when we resilient, we look at being flexible. We look at having, using new ideas in different ways. We look at having a depth of knowledge. We look at, at using, a robust set of a compass of where we're going. All of those things are part of it, and that's part of how we go to the future. And a major part of this is education.
So we were really excited with 100 Year Starship to host along with, Dr. Bristol, something we call Guardians of Pedagogy that was sponsored with the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, where we talk with teachers about what do they do in this world where books are banned? Where they're not allowed to teach about the civil rights? We can't in some places don't want you to teach about Rosa Parks, right? Or Cesar Chavez or any of these things that we know are part of our world, what made our country able to be in the place it is today.
And then I live in Houston, and just before I left Spring Branch Independent School District, which is the third largest district in Houston. I mean, in Texas, not Houston in Texas, changed the curriculum. They removed 13 chapters from the science book curriculum because it mentioned words like depopulation, culture and diversity, vaccinations, climate change. They needed to rewrite that themselves.
Here's the thing: Scientific and technology advances don't come full form. They're not just sitting in the sky waiting for us to find them. It's how we decide to take advantage of our resources as the crux of the matter. But with science we research and what technology we develop depends on the people we are. It depends on our society. This is where we are today. How do we want the world to advance? What things do we want to have happen? I need to just give you a couple of other things before I close out, things that I've been thinking about.
We have to be careful about assigning to nature issues that are profoundly grounded in nurture. So many times we want to attribute how well a student does, how well a group of people do based on something that we found in the genes, and we want to not have anything to do with what happened in society. And I'm not just talking about an intellect.
I'm talking about even in our biology, in our results in health and outcome. I want to suggest to you one other thing and this is really important: don't substitute algorithms for your own critical capacities to think and observe. I know it's really seductive, right? To put that in and say I'm going to get. And now they have AI and I'm gonna put it in and let it make a sentence for me, or some artwork, and we're going to bypass things. Make sure that you think through and understand something. I want you to reconcile that we are part of nature. We're not outside of nature. That's really important. Because so frequently we think of humans you know, we like to say we're different from other animals in life. You know, people say that animals aren't sentient and aware of themselves in time. I think folks who say that clearly have never interacted with the cat, watched a cat, been fortunate enough to be a human friend of a cat, or a.k.a. the cat servant.
Think through discomfort. Discomfort is not just to be avoided at all costs. Discomfort is a signal that something is wrong and worthy of examination. The resolution for that is not to hide in a corner. And again, what we do with science depends on who we are. Women are more valuable than their bodies and have an unassailable right to determine to what use they put their body, and what grows inside of it.
And I have a confession. And a confession is as vocal as I like to believe I am from time to time, I have chosen to focus on certain, chosen to focus on certain areas or not focus on others because I believe surely, surely somebody has that. And we're finding out, yeah, the people who had it are not the ones we want to hold on to it. Right?
Don't ever remove yourself from being able to make comments. Make sure that when you have your place at the table, you use it to make comments, to bring your skills and your perspective to bear. This is really pivotal to the world we live in. Keep your word. It's not okay to willingly dissemble and lie about important public policies issues as a public servant or as an individual period with responsibilities. If your intention cannot be said in the light of day, then perhaps you need to reevaluate it. And I'm not talking about holding yourself up to martyrdom and persecution. But when your actions are going to impact others, especially those that you're supposed to be working on behalf of, have integrity and graciousness.
Is this naive? I don't think so. The duplicity that we're dealing with in the public sphere does not allow for us to move forward in a way that in a world that we want to be in. We have to really pay attention to where we're moving.
And then finally, my last quote from a woman from Alabama is from Dorothy Jemison, my mother, like I said, who was a school teacher in Chicago Public Schools for 25 years. I had the best time going to school with her and, you know, sitting in and they used to call in record days, I don't know what they call them now. And I pretend to teach school and things like that. But my foundation that puts together international science camp, The Earth We Share, that holds many other programs, it was named after her, the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence. And it was named that because, she said, “helping each student to truly achieve their own level of excellence must be the objective of all educators. To merely offer the goal to be number one is foolish. Everyone cannot be number one, and it fails to demand the best of everyone, even those who are number one.”
This is one of the things that I believe in, and I've taken with me all the time. Every day things are happening and as you graduate and you leave here, there are going to be many times where you feel that maybe things are just not right. Right. As living creatures, we're both tenacious and fragile. So I want to make sure that your choices and actions are imbued and steeped in that understanding.
We're tenacious and fragile. Actions in the past have created our world today.
But the beauty is that our actions we take today will create our world tomorrow. Our actions are anchored in our fears, knowledge, loves, hope, faith, experiences, resources, skills, access, capabilities, and what's makes us happy. I want you to do a 360 degree around on yourself as often as you can. Life is not static. So graduation is a transition, you’re evolving, but learn every day. The trick is to continue to grow, to be the person you want to be, not the job you want, the person you want to be.
I'm going to share with you one thing about my space flight. It was this incredible platform to see the Earth and then see my connection to the universe. I vividly remember looking out the window of the shuttle and seeing this planet with its thin, iridescent layer of blue light.
The planet sort of was lit with from within. And one time we flew through the southern lights. You know, the, the northern lights, right? We were seeing them all over the country because of our interaction with what the sun part of our universe. And then looking at a slightly different direction, I recognized my connection to a star system that might have been 10,000 light years away. And it felt right.
And I often look up at the sky with wonder, as I used to do when I was a child, today. Because it helps me to reconnect to the universe and to the world. I share with you this today because the connection to the greater universe is something that I wish for you throughout your lives. Time has a paradox, but while our time is limited, it has infinite possibilities. And we get to choose what to do with each one of those seconds we make.
We have the ability to be hopeful. We have ability to have a vision of inclusion and self-responsibility. And I hope and I hope that no matter what work you do, that you never forget to look up from time to time, look up from the device, every language, the word “look up,” it's not just the physical act. It also has this act of something better ahead that's focused.
So when deadlines loom or someone is sick or the bills need to be paid, injustice looms. It's easy to get caught up and forget who you are, why you're here, and what's most important to you. If you ask most people what they want, they will probably say something about being happy. Yet we expend so much energy and invest so much time being unhappy about the food we're eating, the way someone is talking to us, how we look, or how hard things are at work. We forget that happy is not something that is given to us by others. It is a choice that we get to make every day.
So look up at the sky, the clouds beyond the sun to the moon, the stars, when you need to recharge your spirit. Let the gravity of this planet Earth give you a hug when you're feeling low. Look up and remember what inspired you. Why you're doing this in the first place. Because if you can keep that sparkle in your eye, that dancing energy of aliveness and possibility long past this day, you'll be well on your way to a magical life. A life full of love, service, connection and meaning. A life that will contribute.
Congratulations graduates of the University of California, Berkeley School of Education.