Learning

Although I mostly write poetry, I thought I'd share this as my first piece here. It's not really a story...it's my valedictorian's speech from high school honors convocation.

“O this learning, what a thing it is!” William Shakespeare gave us these immortal words in The Taming of the Shrew, and they couldn’t be more true. Learning is the basis of life, and we are all here in this auditorium simply because we possess the will to learn as much as we can. Throughout our lives, we learn many things in many ways, and it is the sum of these things that has brought us to where we are today.

          Our learning experience began even before we were born when we learned the sound of our mother’s voice. As infants and toddlers, we learned most of the basic skills we use today. We learned to read people’s faces.  We learned to crawl, to balance, and finally to walk, our literal first step toward independence. We learned to listen, to mimic, and to speak, making our voices and opinions heard for the first time. As we grew older and started going to school, we gained the ability to learn more and more complex things and to combine our knowledge in different areas. Without the lessons from our first few years in school, though they seem to be such a natural part of us now, we had no hope of success.

          But learning is not only scholastic; we are also able to pick up knowledge in everyday life. As the saying goes, “You learn something new everyday,” and these things are often part of experience. It is only by experience that we can find what we do and don’t like, and with this knowledge we are able to further pursue the things that interest us. We can learn by observation too. Duke Philip of Chesterfield said, “Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various editions of them.” There is so much to learn by simply taking notice of things going on around us!

          We can also learn through our mistakes and failings. “The child does not begin to fall until she becomes seriously interested in walking, until she actually begins learning. Falling is thus more an indication of learning than a sign of failure.” Polly Berend’s words tell us to take risks for the sake of knowledge, even if it means we fail or make a mistake. These mistakes will just lead us to further knowledge of how to avoid them and how to fix them.

          Throughout the years of our young lives, we have learned a great many things. But we cannot learn something only to forget it, and our presence at this Honors Convocation shows that we have not only learned, but processed, retained, and, most importantly, excelled. But just because we will be handed a diploma, this does not mean we are through learning. True, many of us will go on to college and continue our scholastic learning, but we can’t stop there. Graduation is known as commencement because, while it may bring an end to high school, it signifies only the beginning of our learning. “Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.” Therefore, I implore each and every one of you to keep your hunger for knowledge and continue to learn until the last day of your lives. We must push ourselves to keep finding out new things, to see situations from another perspective, to push past our failures, to grow as people. We must learn and we must teach what we know so that our communities will also grow stronger. If we all keep the scholastic passion that has earned us seats in this auditorium and pass this passion on to others, the world will truly be a better place.