by Addy Eisenach
(transcribed speech)
When I tell people about this college experience, this type of education that I’ve chosen, it comes across as being very untraditional. And in essence, it is untraditional. But I’m going to make the argument today that it is, in fact, traditional and that it follows the tradition of those who came before.
I truly believe that attending this college, you have the opportunity to take part in the greatest conversation of all. And this consists of being able to converse with the greatest minds of the past. I had the opportunity today, the unique opportunity, to hear from Arthur Brooks, who is a social scientist and business professor at Harvard.
And today he spoke about how education has become so written with information. And he said that college has never been the same since 2008. And when he said that, I first thought maybe he meant the recession that took place in 2008. But what he was referring to was that after 2008, we all had smart devices in our hands, and that with the click of a button, we could receive information extremely quickly. And he was saying that this has been a hindrance in the world of academia and education because we are so accustomed to filling our mind with information. He said that you can look around and people value collecting data and analysis and running research. But he said that there’s this dilemma that exists at Harvard currently. And I think it’s plaguing our modern educational system. And that is that we don’t know how to ask the age-old questions. And he said that the mark of a true scholar is someone who knows how to not just give good answers but ask good questions. And I believe that is true. Some of those questions that I love, some existential questions: Does God exist? What is the meaning of my life? What am I willing to die for? Was the earth created ex nihilo, out of nothing, or was it created ex materia, out of something? These are the questions that we can never forget. And I want to highlight two professors whose teaching style has stood out to me in this way.
Our professor, the late Gordon Jones. I took his class for four semesters, Development of Civilization, I love that course. There were so many lessons I learned from Doctor Jones, but one of them was that he asked us to read the material and then submit questions for review in class. And so we would submit these questions on slides.
And I remember as a new freshman at John Adams, I don’t know if my questions were good. I was pretty self-conscious of my questions. But he never made me doubt that they had a place. And then our professor seated up here, Dr. Rogers, who I have had the privilege of taking a class from this past semester, he has been amazing in his approach to teaching.
And one of the things he does is he’ll ask us a question, and then he will not give us the answer. And he will make us sit in silence, I think the longest has been like ten minutes. And he said that one of his colleagues once told him that it’s important to become comfortable in silence, because that’s where we learn how to learn.
I am so grateful that I’ve had the chance to take part in this ongoing great conversation. I think about the books that I’ve had the opportunity to read in the school, and they’ve made such a difference in my life. I’m going to name some of them: Plato’s Republic, Plato’s Phaedo. Being able to read Aristotle’s Ethics, being able to study Isaac Newton’s Principia, all of these great people and more, names such as Descartes, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Sidney, Fillmer. The list goes on.
And I have such respect for these men. One of my favorite essays in academia was written by a woman. Her name is Dorothy Sayers. This essay was assigned by Mr. C. my freshman year. And it’s entitled The Lost Tools of Learning and Dorothy Sayers herself, she attended Oxford, she felt that there were certain tools that had been lost in education.
And she just stressed this importance. And she talked about what is called the Trivium and the Quadrivium. And essentially what that means is during medieval times in education and learning, students were expected to have a really proficient understanding of rhetoric and dialectic, and in grammar. And this was really important. And Dorothy Sayers, she’s like my soul sister. I love her. She said that one of her favorite subjects was Latin. She loved the Latin language. She said, if you learn the Latin language, you’ll decrease the difficulty of learning any other subject by 50%. And well, I’ve been here at John Adams College. I’ve had the amazing chance to take four semesters of Latin, and there have been days when I wanted to just walk out of the classroom.
You can ask any one of my friends here, and my professors, it was a real struggle for me. But I didn’t want to give up because I knew the value of it. And just to kind of tie it back to John Adams, because our college’s name is John Adams. When John Adams was receiving his education, he did not like Latin. And he said to his dad, I’m done with this language study. And so John Adams’ father said, well, you can come and work on the farm with me. So John Adams goes and works on the farm, and then he spends one day out in the scorching sun, and he says, no I’ll study Latin. He goes on to be a great Founder as we know him in this amazing republic.
I love it. I love learning, and I have had so many experiences during my time here that I can hardly count them, and it’s been difficult being able to put them into a speech because I don’t know how I can recount everything that’s happened. But I will share this one experience. I took this class by another professor that’s up here.
Mrs. Greenman; she taught this class on Science or Science Fiction. And essentially, the class was about what is true science and what is pseudoscience. You know what is truth, what is error. And I remember I was sitting in one of her classes and we were reading this philosopher, whose name is Leibniz, and he’s debating John Locke because John Locke believes that we come into this world as a blank slate, and our minds need to be filled with information.
And Leibniz makes the argument that, no, we already arrived on this earth with preexisting principles and knowledge, and you already know that there’s truths inside of you. And I remember sitting in Mrs. Greenman’s class, and I just became really emotional. I shed some tears as I was thinking about that. I believe there are natural laws, there are eternal laws that we cannot lose when we learn.
If my education has taught me anything, it’s just increased my knowledge and belief in God. I think that sometimes education has an effect where we become really cynical of the world. And I’ve seen that with some of my friends in academia, the intellectual wisdom that kind of seeps into us. And I feel like, as people, sometimes we start to feel like power corrupts, and I believe that a true education should only bring you closer to God and it should not pull you from Him, and it should not make you feel skeptical of His plan for us.
I am indebted, indebted to these professors who sit up there. I want to thank them for inspiring me to continue learning for a lifetime. I know that this isn’t the end for me. You know what the future looks like. I want to continue this, and I feel that it’s a part of my mission. So the end of my speech: to my professors, who have seen education as more than job training, as more than grades, as more than just quotas, but who have seen it as what it’s really meant to be. I’m grateful for this opportunity, and I will miss you all. And I’m thankful for what lies ahead and the new things that I’ve found. I’m just really grateful to be here.