The commencement season is upon us, and it will be over in a few days. The hired robes are returned, and the textbooks are thankfully disposed of, leaving thousands of parents feeling relieved and the young graduates feeling slightly lost.
I can’t remember my own graduation, but I do remember the enormous sense of relief afterwards. The world was my oyster; I could do anything. But nothing works out quite the way you expect. It was obvious to everyone that I was unfit for anything except becoming a professor. This inevitably involved more years of study, more graduations, and the acquisition of a pipe and a tweed jacket.
But it was easy for my generation, let’s admit it. There were many career paths that made sense and stretched far into the future. In theory, you could make a life plan that would almost guarantee a smooth passage through career and marriage to retirement and the nursing home and that final graduation. They seldom worked out, except for the last part.
My best friend at high school had a detailed life plan by the age of fifteen. He had it all worked out: a degree in economics, a safe government job, a little house, a wife, two children, and early retirement at sixty to a resort on the coast. I’ve long since lost touch with him, but I hope he made it. If he did, it would be a miracle. Life rarely rolls so smoothly along the tracks we have laid down for it.
In 2025, it is not easy to even conceive that kind of definite life plan, let alone follow it. Not only is the familiar world of businesses, professions, and public institutions being turned upside down, but the very idea of knowledge, expertise, and rational thought is under attack. Graduation always brings uncertainty, but now uncertainty has been raised to an art form.
It feels like a kind of commencement for all of us, as if we need to go back and start again. The new Orwellian curriculum is confusing for the educated mind. Facts are not facts, science is not science, history is not history, law is not law, and world order is world chaos. This is not what I learned in school, or you, probably. Where did we go wrong?
Commencement speakers tend to offer metaphors of life as a mountain to climb, life as a race to run, and even life as a game to be played. But, in reality, life is a puzzle to be solved, a difficult, fluid, ever-changing puzzle. I have every confidence that the graduates of 2025 will be up to the challenge and will find their way in this inverted world, whatever their original life plans might have been. Lawyers may become casino operators, scientists will turn to alchemy, and doctors will discover faith healing. I wish them every success, whatever they do, at least enough success and enough judgment to become regular contributors to public radio. That’s what education is about.
