A Talk Prepared for the Series “What Does it Mean to be Educated?”
Brigham Young University, March 2021, Drew Gilpin Faust
During our first week of college in 1964, my freshman class gathered in a cavernous auditorium designed to look like a medieval hall to hear an address from the college president. The ceremony was to be the capstone of our orientation week. This was Bryn Mawr, a venerable institution founded in the late nineteenth century to provide university level education for women at a time when that was a revolutionary notion. From its beginnings it had been a place of very serious intellectual ambition, and that had inspired many of us in attendance to choose to come there. The president, Miss Katherine McBride, embodied that seriousness – to the point of being downright intimidating. She had been president since before any of us were born. Her hair pulled back into a tight bun, she had a stern and forbidding demeanor that made an indelible impression on us all.
A half century later, I found myself a college president addressing gatherings of newly arrived freshman, and I fear that what I said on those occasions was likely little noted nor long remembered. But much of Miss McBride’s message has stayed with me to this day. I was struck first of all that she repeatedly referred to “our work” in an almost reverential way—the way one might describe an author or an artist’s oeuvre. We were not just going to take classes or decide on majors; these would be part of a more all-encompassing understanding of our purposes. It gave what we were embarking on a new kind of importance – – almost a transcendence. But even more memorable for me was another emphasis in her remarks. Learning, she said, must begin with humility. To truly learn, you must open yourself up to the notion that you have a lot to learn, that what you do not know is close to infinite. A sense of ignorance fuels the desire to overcome it. Humility is a prerequisite for becoming educated.
Many of us present that day had a kind of deer-in-the-headlights approach as we faced our first days of college. If we were supposed to be humble, it wasn’t going to be all that hard. But Miss McBride intended a more lasting humility. It was not meant to be a posture just for the initial weeks of our college experience; it was not an outlook later to be abandoned as we reached the lofty status of juniors or seniors. Humility should be a permanent commitment and condition, because knowledge was itself endless. There would always be more to know than we had already learned. Our work, our education would never be complete. Education is not a destination. One can never say, “Great! Now I have my BA or PHD or MD or JD” or whatever it might be and “now I am educated!” Education is a process and a vocation, a work in progress. I am still becoming educated. Miss McBride was herself known for always asking, “What can I learn from this?” As long as life lasts, so too do the opportunities to learn anew. We need to make sure we are open and ready for them.
Making humility the source and even the engine of learning has some significant implications for how we pursue that goal. The first I have just mentioned. Education is lifelong because what you don’t know will always exceed what you do. But embracing humility involves other imperatives as well. Almost by definition, humility is the opposite of narcissism and self-absorption. Education must be about seeing and knowing more than just about ourselves. Education requires us to look beyond our own experience and seek to understand our lives within a broader context.
There are many intellectual avenues by which to accomplish this. The requirements of the undergraduate curriculum here at Brigham Young University outline a number of them, endeavoring to illuminate many of the pathways you might choose to follow – – You have 187 possible majors! They range across all the sciences, social sciences and humanities. The infinity of the galaxies or the complexity of a single human cell are sobering reminders of the enormity of the universe in which we occupy such a miniscule place. Literary study takes us beyond ourselves as well, introducing us to characters and circumstances outside our own experience. The insights of a novelist or a playwright or a poet help us to get inside someone else’s head, to see the world from a different perspective, through others’ eyes. Literature is often described as nurturing the sense of empathy—of our ability to imaginatively project our own consciousness into that of another human being, or theirs into us. It encourages us to notice that which we might otherwise not see.
Anthropology is another such avenue. In its pursuit of ethnography, it urges us to look at other worlds, at places and cultures that may seem strange and disorienting—humbling as we come to recognize our dependence on the taken- for-granted assumptions of our own world. We seek to understand how people different from ourselves interpret their own behavior, how they construct habits, relationships and beliefs. Why do people eat certain foods and not others? Why, by implication, do we? Why do they marry certain people and not others? How and why do different societies treat death differently? And what rituals do they observe to mark the meaning of those choices?
Every field on offer here at BYU can enable you to develop a new perspective on your life and experience if you open yourself to being a little disoriented, to seeing your own assumptions and choices as contingent, to examining their foundations in order to understand them anew. The field of History to which I have devoted my life and career is one that I have found particularly suited to pose questions meaningful to my own experiences. James Baldwin once wrote, “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.” But learning and questioning can offer a means of escaping that entrapment. A true understanding of the past can disentangle us from lingering vestiges of harmful assumptions that may in hidden ways influence us still. Just as literature or anthropology or the sciences help us to see beyond ourselves, history enables us to do similar work by placing our lives in a context of time as well as space. It can help us understand what brought us to where we are – – and thus free us to see how we might act in order to move toward where we want to go.
A few years ago, I published a book about Americans’ attitudes toward death in the nineteenth century, asking how they were affected by the enormous human cost of the Civil War. I was deeply moved by the many letters and diaries by soldiers and civilians alike describing bereavement and loss. But I also was struck by how our forebears lived in a world very different from our own. Modern American society has often been described as one that denies and endeavors to hide death. My colleague Atul Gawande, a distinguished surgeon who is also a best- selling author, has written powerfully about this. Mortality was not one of the things he learned about in medical school, he explains; there was a deep “reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying”; the reality of death in our culture, he believes, “has been largely hidden.”
In nineteenth-century America, I found in my research, things were quite different. Of course, in an age of high infant mortality, an age before the
discovery of the germ theory and of antibiotics, mortality would have been more difficult to avoid or deny. But nineteenth century Americans chose to give death a central place in their systems of belief. By acknowledging that life will end, they insisted, a person embraces a sense of life’s preciousness; because it is finite, life must be not just treasured, but used to its fullest purpose. Awareness of death, they believed, gave life deeper meaning and purpose.
Reading about how our forebears approached the devastation of Civil War – – whose death toll measured as the equivalent of more than 7 million people in the United States today – – I was made vividly aware of the choices our contemporary society has made in its approach to death, choices quite different than those available to Americans just 150 years ago. Our reluctance to think about death, as Dr. Gawande illustrates in his moving book, Being Mortal, has led us to want to hide the aging and dying in nursing homes, to avoid speaking about death to individuals left to confront it alone, to fail to consult with the dying about what they most hope the quality of their last weeks and days might be. But my excursion into to the past made me see that these attitudes are not inevitable; people in other times and places have thought and acted otherwise. We would do well to open ourselves to what those from other times and places might tell us. Dr. Gawande urges us all to make other choices, to reform the experiences of aging and dying in a way that brings greater compassion to those facing the end of life.
Dr. Gawande published his book well before the pandemic brought the realities of death in our country much closer to some of the experiences of the nineteenth- century. When Covic-19 struck, we had no antibiotics that could end the spread of this disease; we had inadequate preparation and facilities for the sick and for those who died. We were as unprepared for the enormous death toll as nineteenth century Americans had been for the losses of the Civil War. When I learned last spring of a field hospital erected in Central Park and coffins piled up in refrigerated trucks awaiting burial, I felt I had been transported to another era I had only known through books and manuscripts. We had assumed a kind of confidence – -even arrogance – – that reassured us we were beyond anything like that. Immune, we might say, meaning it both literally and metaphorically. But we were not. We were facing some of the same dilemmas and were ourselves now struggling to retain not just our lives, but our sense of humanity and decency in face of the epidemic’s demands.
We could learn much about managing mass death by opening ourselves up to listen to the voices of those who have preceded us. As classicist Kyle Harper has written in an op-ed comparing our pandemic to a plague that ravaged ancient Rome: “History is powerful because we can identify with the hopes, follies and sorrows of those who have come before us. In recognizing the limits of their power in face of nature we can also acknowledge our own.” But these admissions of frailty, he urges, “should not make us fatalistic. Rather, it should inspire us to be less complacent.” A deepened humility enables us not just to see more clearly, but to act, to understand our choices differently as we place them in the context of choices made by others in other times and places. It is both clarifying and empowering. And just as humility is a foundation for education, so education reinforces that humility.
My research on death and nineteenth century Americans led me to believe there were things I could learn from them, things they might have understood better than I did. But a lot of my investigations into the past have led me to a quite different set of conclusions. Many historical figures from that era believed, expressed, and actively defended views that today we find abhorrent. As part of a broader racial reckoning in this country we are confronting and condemning those views. We are removing monuments and statues and building names intended to honor those who devoted their lives to advancing ideas and policies sharply at odds with our present-day commitments to equality and justice. We are right to be doing this. We should have stopped honoring such individuals long ago. We are just to claim in this instance that we know better than the past. So how then do these principles of openness and humility fit in? How can we be educated by listening to those we deplore as well as those we admire?
I wrote my PhD thesis and first book about a group of pre-Civil War southerners who defended slavery. Looking back, I am sure that I was influenced in choosing this topic by having grown up in segregated 1950s Virginia, where all the adults influential in my life accepted and supported the indefensible racial status quo. These were the people who instructed me in the principles of Christianity in Sunday School and the principles of American democracy in my school classrooms. How had those I loved and even looked up to convinced themselves to accept a system so patently wrong, UnAmerican and UnChristian? I wondered a lot about this as a child and at the age of nine even defied my parents and wrote a letter to President Eisenhower demanding that he support school integration. Nearly two decades later, my PhD thesis represented another way of
posing the same question, but this time to the inhabitants of a different century: how could white southerners of the antebellum era who regarded themselves as decent Christian people, who got up in the morning believing they were righteous and moral, come not just to tolerate but actively defend such a cruel and unjust system? They were seen – -and saw themselves – – as upright citizens How did they convince themselves of these despicable beliefs and justify their loathsome actions?
And here is where the humility part comes in: How might we today be deluding ourselves in ways not unlike those in which they deluded themselves? How do the mechanisms of self-justification and moral blindness operate? How did these antebellum southerners define and understand their choices? How might we today, reflecting on their lives, be more clear-sighted about our own choices? I often wonder what it is our grandchildren and great grandchildren will find appalling about us. That we eat meat? That we are not doing more about climate change? That one certainly. I hope that they will not just condemn and dismiss us, but endeavor to understand how we saw our options as we sought to live what we intended to be decent moral lives. I believe that if we approach the past with the goal of understanding rather than judging, we have the opportunity to learn from the shortcomings as well as the achievements of our forebears. If we can comprehend the sources and mechanisms of their blindnesses, perhaps we can better equip ourselves to acknowledge and confront our own.
Studying history has diminished my eagerness to judge or condemn people – – in the past and the present – – and has enhanced my desire – – and I hope my capacity – – to understand, to see the world through others’ eyes. Viet Thanh Nguyen, who fled Vietnam with his family at the age of 4 has written powerfully about the history and memory of what we in the United States call the Vietnam War. Confronting the difficult truths of the past, he argues, is essential to acting ethically in the present. “Reminding ourselves that being human also means being inhuman is important simply because it is so easy to forget our inhumanity or to displace it onto other humans . . . If we do not recognize our capacity to victimize then it would be difficult for us to prevent the victimization carried out on our behalf, or which we do ourselves.“ History humbles us by revealing our capacity to victimize, but in that revelation it equips us with the possibility of resisting those instincts and perhaps even overcoming them.
I want to consider another manner in which humility is central to the continuing lifelong project of education. And this has to do with the humility of
acknowledging that we are lucky. No matter how many obstacles we have overcome, we have received our education in some measure through no cause of our own. Our parents, our health, our schools, our teachers, our coaches, our financial aid, a book that changed our lives, predecessors who fought for access to education; someone who guided us; someone who propped us up when we were down, persuaded us to persevere and not give up. We all are the product of much more than ourselves. Our search to become educated is made possible by those who came before us and those who walk alongside us. Learning occurs in communities: the community of those who have accumulated the knowledge we seek to master; the community that enables us to acquire it for ourselves.
We are not hardwired to recognize this. We tend to attribute meaning, logic, cause to things that may be in large part fortuitous. We tend to overemphasize our own agency. Now I do not want to belittle all that each one of you has done to earn your way to BYU and to thrive here. You should have great pride in all of it. But the opportunities we enjoy can come to seem like entitlements, ours because we deserve them. Part of becoming educated is understanding things might have been otherwise and accepting the obligation that comes with that recognition. Think of those who have not had our luck. Think of Malala, who was shot because she was determined to go to school. Think of enslaved men and women in the pre-Civil War South risking severe punishment by secretly learning to read although it was forbidden by law. Think of Helen Keller, unable to see or hear, who learned to read by tapping out words on her teacher’s palm and then went on to graduate from college and write 14 books. Think of all those who have faced similar or even higher obstacles and NOT been able to find a path to overcome them.
Education ought to be a right, but in too many instances, in too many places in the world it remains a privilege. We have been extraordinary beneficiaries of this privilege, and we must not take that for granted. When we acknowledge that reality, we accept responsibility to make sure that the education that has enabled us to see a world beyond ourselves also compels us into serving those whose luck did not – – for whatever reason – – put them in the same spot we occupy. “Each one, teach one.” It is a saying often attributed to slavery times and the obligation that rested on any enslaved person who learned to read to then teach someone who hadn’t. The phrase was used by prisoners at Robben Island in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was held for eighteen years. Any prisoner who was literate had the obligation to instruct another. In
2017, Denzel Washington invoked the words in a commencement speech at Dillard University. “Each one. Teach one,” he said. “Don’t just aspire to make a living, aspire to make a difference.” Humbled by our good fortune, we should do whatever we can to share it. Though we continue to pursue it for our whole lives, we should never take our education for granted.
A few years ago, the Graduate School of Education at Harvard adopted a motto that it emblazoned on banners and brochures and fund-raising appeals. It was a great double entendre: “Learn to change the world.” Meaning #1; Learn in order to change the world. Education changes the world. By implication: the School of Education is in a field that really matters. But also meaning #2: learn how to change the world – – which the words imply one can do by acquiring specific skills and approaches at the Ed School. The phrase is at once an invitation: come and learn how to change the world and a statement of fact: education changes the world. Change, the message is, lies at the heart of what education does, how it empowers us and what it demands of us. Seeing beyond ourselves enables us to imagine and act on behalf of a different future.
The research mission of universities that rests at the heart of higher education is fundamentally about change. At Harvard, the essential question we ask as we consider appointing a professor is “What has this person done to alter and enhance our understanding of the world?” We tenure faculty who have made new contributions to knowledge, who have transformed their fields and are eager to share these new findings with their students. Here at BYU, recent faculty discoveries range from insights into how family structures affected the Founding Fathers’ votes on the Constitution, to the effects of social media on suicide risk for teenage girls to the implications of ice sheet dynamics for historical ecosystems. Students at BYU are themselves already involved in making scholarly contributions to the store of human knowledge – – analyzing datasets from 1918 to better understand the nature of pandemics, designing thermal imaging systems to detect wildfires, using machine learning to solve a complex chemical problem. They, too, are caught up in the change that is fundamental to the educational process.
And the centrality of this change is closely tied to the imperatives of humility I have been describing. To seek to be educated is to being willing to submit ourselves to a process of growth, to say we are willing to alter parts of ourselves in order to take on new ones. BYU’s mission statement aspires to an education that is “spiritually strengthening, intellectually enlarging, character building.” To
strengthen, to enlarge, to build is necessarily to change. A senior at BYU sees a different world from the one she knew as a freshman. The wider contexts and perspectives of the fields I have described will have defined a new universe—one shaped by the new galaxies or the past centuries her studies have revealed to her – – a larger universe than the more limited one with which she entered. And appropriate humility will have imbued her as well with the sense of appreciation and responsibility that guarantees that her education will not just enable but compel her to seek to build a better world. She will have learned to change the world.
The centrality of change to education brings me to the second H of my title. Hope. In its very essence, education is about hope and about the future. The 33,000 students at BYU came here with aspirations about what education could make possible, about how their lives would be changed and improved as a result of the time they spend here. And BYU has high hopes for all of you. Education casts its eye on creating a different future—a different personal future for those who grow into doctors or lawyers or nurses or accountants or teachers. But this university emphasizes that it seeks more than training. It recognizes that education must be about a different future not just for ourselves as individuals but for a wider society that will benefit from the contributions of those who learn. This is an idea at the heart of American higher education. For example, it underlay the Morrill Act of 1862 that established the land grant university system as the federal government’s first and most sweeping contribution to our educational system and affirmed the principle that education must necessarily be a public good in terms both of its availability and its impact.
These actions and these principles are founded in hope. They display a commitment to a future that will be better because of our determination to become educated. Dedicating oneself to a lifelong process of learning is to be an idealist, to reject despair, to embrace the future. America’s Founding Fathers saw education as essential to their vision of the new nation and what it might become. Education would be a vehicle through which their hope and dream for a lasting republic and a more perfect union might be realized. They were certain it could not be realized without it. “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people,” John Adams declared. “Surely,” James Madison concurred, “it belongs to our Colleges and Universities to lay the Foundation from which the future glory of America shall arise.” “If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the People,” Thomas Jefferson agreed, “this will be their great
security “ against tyranny. “If a nation expects to be ignorant – – and free,” he believed, “it expects what never was and never will be.” Jefferson, as you know, founded a university to embody these principles and regarded it, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, as the crowning achievement of his life. It was what he wished to have inscribed on his tombstone. In 1821, near the end of his life, Jefferson wrote of the “hope that light and liberty are on a steady advance.” The new nation was now 45 years old. Enlightenment and freedom stood united together in his mind, moving forward together and fueling the hopes he had nurtured for so long.
Our national project and our educational project have advanced together since our country’s founding. Every extension of rights, every new birth of freedom has been accompanied by the expansion of access to education. Our hopes of being a more perfect union and of including more and different sorts of people within our body politic have been inseparable from our commitment to education as both cause and outcome of that progress. “Education,” Frederick Douglass declared, “means emancipation.” And just as education has shaped our national identity and aspirations, as well as our optimism about our possibilities, so too it has and continues to shape us all individually. Education is the vehicle we ride to the future, both individually and collectively. We will continue to be educated in one way or another until our very last breath. But our commitment should be to be educated well—broadly with a humility that opens us to the widest possibilities for knowledge and hopefully, with an eye to how learning can enable us to contribute to a better future, not just for ourselves but for all the world. Benjamin Franklin once said that the “great Aim and End of all learning” was an “Inclination join’d with an Ability to Serve Mankind.” It would be hard to sum it up better than that.