Commencement Address by Wendell Berry
In all the history of teaching and learning, our own time may be the
oddest. We seem to be obsessed with education. Newspapers spend an
enormous flow of ink on articles, editorials, and letters about
education. Presidents of public universities appear on the op-ed pages,
prophesying the death of American civilization as the inevitable
result of fiscal caution. Our governmental hallways are hardly passable
because of university lobbyists kneeling and pleading for public
dollars. One might conclude that we are panic-stricken at the thought
of any educational inadequacy measurable in unappropriated funds.
And yet by all this fuss we are promoting a debased commodity paid for
by the people, sanctioned by the government, for the benefit of the
corporations. For the most part, its purpose is now defined by the
great and the would-be-great “research universities.” These gigantic
institutions, increasingly formed upon the “industrial model,” no
longer make even the pretense of preparing their students for
responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity. They have
repudiated their old obligation to pass on to students at least
something of their cultural inheritance. The ideal graduate no longer
is to have a mind well-equipped to serve others, or to judge competently
the purposes for which it may be used.
Now, according to those institutions of the “cutting edge,” the
purpose of education is unabashedly utilitarian. Their interest is
almost exclusively centered in the technical courses called, with
typical ostentation of corporate jargon, STEM: science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics. The American civilization so ardently
promoted by these institutions is to be a civilization entirety
determined by technology, and not encumbered by any thought of what is
good or worthy or neighborly or humane.
The course of study called STEM is in reality only a sort of job
training for upward (and lateral) mobility. It is also a subsidy
granted to the corporations, which in a system of free enterprise might
reasonably be expected to do their own job training. And in the great
universities even this higher job training is obstructed by the hustle
and anxiety of “research,” often involving yet another corporate raid
on the public domain.
I do not mean to say that it is impossible to get something like an
education in even the most ambitious university. After all, if you
have a library, classrooms, laboratories, and an assemblage of doctors
diversely learned, you have the makings of an actual school. And in
such a place a young person might still pursue a respectable course of
study. But that possibility seems less and less probable.
Actual education seems now to be far more probable in the smaller
schools, and I think you graduates are fortunate to have been students
at Bellarmine. A school the size of this one still can function as a
community of teachers and students, with responsible community life as
its unifying aim. But you must not forget that the purposes and
standards of the world into which you are graduating have not been set
by institutions such as this one, but rather by the proponents of STEM,
who would like you to have a well-paying job as an unconscious expert
with Jesus Christ Munitions Incorporated, or Cleanstream Water
Polluters, or the Henry Thoreau Noise Factory, or the John Muir Forest
Reduction Corporation, or the Promised Land Mountain Removal Service.
You are not going to discover that the STEM project recognizes the
standards of ecological and community health, or that it proposes the
real national security of coherent local economies or sustainable
methods of land use. You will be told instead that you and your
community are now ruled by a global corporate empire, to which all the
earth is a “third world,” against which you have no power of resistance
or self-determination, and within which you have no vocational choice
except a technical and servile job which will give you a small share of
the plunder.
You will be told also – ignoring our permanent dependence on food,
clothing, and shelter – that you live in a “knowledge-based economy,”
which in fact is deeply prejudiced against all knowledge that does not
produce the quickest possible return on investment. Even as the
ecologists (who manifestly are excluded from STEM) have greatly enlarged
our knowledge of ecosystems, their complexity and fragility and their
need for care, our knowledge of our own species has been radically
simplified. STEM’s definition of humanity includes no suggestion of
reverence or neighborliness or stewardship. Instead, people are
encouraged to think of themselves as individuals, self-interested and
greedy by nature, violent by economic predestination, and members of
nothing except their careers. The lives of these “autonomous”
individuals will be “successful” insofar as they subserve the purposes
of the corporate-political powers, who will regard them merely as
consumers, votes, and units of “human capital.”
At commencement exercises it is customary to invite a speaker to
exhort the graduates not to think of the end of their formal education
as the end of their education, but rather to continue to learn and to
grow in consciousness as they go forth to the duties and trials of
responsible citizenship. As the designated speaker of this ceremony, I
am serious about this duty. I do hereby exhort the graduates to
continue to learn and to grow in consciousness as responsible citizens.
And I do so knowing that no exhortation could be more subversive in
the world as defined by the proponents of STEM.
To urge you toward responsible citizenship is to say that I do not
accept either the technological determinism or the conventional greed
or the thoughtless individualism of that world. Nor do I accept the
global corporate empire and its economic totalitarianism as an
irresistible force. I am here to say that if you love your family, your
neighbors, your community, and your place, you are going to have to
resist. Or I should say instead that you are going to have to join the
many others, all over our country and the world, who already are
resisting – those who believe, in spite of the obstacles and the odds,
that a reasonable measure of self-determination, for persons and
communities, is both desirable and necessary. Of the possibility of
effective resistance there is a large, ever-growing catalogue of
proofs: of projects undertaken by local people, without official
permission or instruction, that work to reduce the toxicity, the
violence, and the self-destructiveness of our present civilization. The
resistance I am recommending will involve you endlessly in
out-of-school learning, the curriculum of which will be defined by
questions such as these:
What more than you have so far learned will you need to know in order
to live at home? (I don’t mean “home” as a house for sale.) If you
decide, or if you are required by circumstances, to live all your life
in one place, what will you need to know about it and about yourself?
At present our economy and society are founded on the assumption that
energy will always be unlimited and cheap; but what will you have to
learn to live in a world in which energy is limited and expensive?
What will you have to know – and know how to do – when your community
can no longer be supplied by cheap transportation? Will you be satisfied
to live in a world owned or controlled by a few great corporations? If
not, would you consider the alternative: self-employment in a small
local enterprise owned by you, offering honest goods or services to
your neighbors and responsible stewardship to your community?
Even to ask such questions, let alone answer them, you will have to
refuse certain assumptions that the proponents of STEM and the
predestinarians of the global economy wish you to take for granted.
You will have to avoid thinking of yourselves as employable minds
equipped with a few digits useful for pushing buttons. You will have
to recover for yourselves the old understanding that you are whole
beings inextricably and mysteriously compounded of minds and bodies.
You will have to understand that the logic of success is radically
different from the logic of vocation. The logic of what our society
means by “success” supposedly leads you ever upward to any
higher-paying job that can be done sitting down. The logic of vocation
holds that there is an indispensable justice, to yourself and to
others, in doing well the work that you are “called” or prepared by
your talents to do.
And so you must refuse to accept the common delusion that a career is
an adequate context for a life. The logic of success insinuates that
self-enlargement is your only responsibility, and that any job, any
career will be satisfying if you succeed in it. But I can tell you, on
the authority of much evidence, that a lot of people highly successful
by that logic are painfully dissatisfied. I can tell you further that
you cannot live in a career, and that satisfaction can come only from
your life. To give satisfaction, your life will have to be lived in a
family, a neighborhood, a community, an ecosystem, a watershed, a
place, meeting your responsibilities to all those things to which you
belong.
I am sure that you are going to come face to face with the questions
and issues I have mentioned, and I am sure that I don’t know how you
will answer. People who speak at commencements speak in hope, but also
in ignorance. However you may answer, I join the rest of your elders in
worrying about you and in wishing you well.