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News & Events
In the News
Opening Remarks, 2008 College of Education Graduation
Dean Patricia A. Wasley
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Graduation is my favorite day. It is not because so many of our students are leaving—no, that makes all of us a little sad even while we are happy.
Graduation is my favorite day because it envelops us an atmosphere of hope and the promise of positive change. It is a time when we celebrate the academic 
achievements of a new generation. Every graduate in the room has made the personal investment of time, and in untold effort. The familial investment in getting each of you through graduate school is also substantial—and we do know it takes an entire family to support a graduate student. Now that you have graduated, the promise of hope and positive change shifts to what each of you will do with your newfound expertise, with your preparation, with the investment you and your family and our faculty have made in your capabilities.
This year, our 94th year as a college of education, a college that ranks number 7 in the US News and World Report Rankings, we graduate 400 new professionals—American educators—teachers, university professors, policy makers, administrators, school psychologists, special educators, early childhood educators and researchers. We are counting on you to change the system; we believe that you will invest your newly honed intellect, passion, and expertise in creating a better education system. Our country desperately needs you to fulfill that particular promise, that hope for change.
What needs changing in education?
I recently went to China to create two partnerships in order to move towards a new goal we have as a responsible college in a global world. We hope eventually to make it possible for every one of our students to have the opportunity to spend some portion of his or her graduate school time in another country learning about a different education system. This year, we had students in Norway, in the United Arab Emirates, in South Africa, and in a number of other countries. We think this is important because 1) there is much to learn from other systems; 2) looking at another system enables us to see our priorities, our goals and our commitments and to rethink them. Let me illustrate what I mean by describing a couple of incidents in China.
One of the cities I visited was Chongqing. I was astounded to learn that it is the largest city in the world. 33 million people. I went to an elementary school where we were invited to their end of the year celebration. First, nearly 500 children participated in a singing and dancing extravaganza. I watched the children sing 20 songs in 20 languages—30 Scheherazades singing in Arabic; 50 Mickey and Minnie mice singing “It’s a Small World After All”; thirty little Russian Cossacks singing in Russian, 25 little Athenians singing in Greek and on it went. The performances were just wonderful—all emceed by a 5-year-old, an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old. It was polished and well executed and really, just delightful.
On the one hand the whole country has had children learning these songs and all the children have been competing to be selected to be in the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games. On the other hand, when we visited the Ministry of Education in Beijing, they suggested that they have three goals for the education of their children in their country. 1) They hope every child will be tri-lingual so that China can speak to the rest of the world; 2) They hope every child will be creative and innovative—so that they can be more like the Americans. They have increased the time children spend in music and the arts in order to ensure that creativity is more fully developed; and 3) they hope to equalize the educational opportunities children have whether they live in cities or in rural and remote areas.
I have been haunted by the memory of watching all those children dance and sing, and by the other images of classrooms where high school students were studying traditional Chinese arts, because in school after school across this nation we have been eliminating the arts in order to have more time to drill students so that the kids might pass the numerous standardized tests required by No Child Left Behind. Instead of a balanced curriculum, we have been narrowing the curriculum and ignoring some of the subjects that children enjoy the most. And, more alarmingly, we have been ignoring their creativity.
A second example of how studying how education is done in another country can illuminate our priorities: after the children performed, the mayor of Chongqing came forward. The mayor of a city of 33 million is equivalent to the governor of California, so it was not inconsequential that he should appear on the stage of an elementary school. He gave a very thoughtful speech and presented awards to the 25 parents whose children had been most academically successful. Awards to the parents! The parents were dressed to the nines and just absolutely beaming. They were so proud of their children and so gratified to have been recognized themselves for their contributions. He talked repeatedly about how critical it is for parents to participate in their children’s education, that parents provide the leadership, the model of an educated person to their children. He went on to say that children value what their parents value.
Two things struck me about his speech and the parade of parents. First, it’s true; we do celebrate what we value. If we want parents to value helping their kids to succeed in school, we need to celebrate it. In this country there are far fewer celebrations of academic accomplishment. Most of our celebrations are around athletic accomplishment.
Second, Chinese parents—as most parents in developing nations do—view education as critical to the health of their nation and to the improvement and strengthening of their families.
Clearly, everyone in this audience believes similarly. Your presence demonstrates your beliefs about how important education is. Unfortunately, far too many parents in our nation do not share the strength or depth of that belief.
So, how what do these examples from China suggest for you, our graduates? Our education system is not good enough. While there are pockets of excellence everywhere, what we really need is an excellent system. In order to get such a system, we are investing our hopes in you to change things where-ever you are—in universities, think tanks, governor’s offices, pre-schools, research organization—for the better. Our role, as educators, must be to continue to learn—to study inside and outside of our own country. We need to be tireless in confirming to parents that a good education is essential to a better life, a stronger nation, and a better democracy. We need to ensure that we attend the imaginative capacity of our country so that our good old American “can-do” ability will expand and grow. Because our education system presents a wicked problem, it will require that all of you work as hard as you can for the rest of your professional lives and we will do the same.
While life-long effort sounds incredibly daunting—especially when you have just finished something very time consuming and difficult, I found an inspirational example in the New York Times last week. Former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor believes that “civics education has become less of a priority in the era of standardized testing.” At 78, after a full and very impressive, rigorous professional career, she is developing an interactive website which will feature a new curriculum entitled, Our Courts to help young people understand how our courts work. She is learning the art of digital gaming because she believes that she needs to use the tools that will engage today’s learners. As O’Connor notes, “Knowledge about our government is not handed down through the gene pool. Every generation has to learn it.” So, she is digging in, learning something new. In the article she said that had people told her several years ago that she’d be working on digital games, she would have thought they’d had one too many!
All of this delivers me back to the point I wish to make. Graduation is a hopeful day. It is a day when we see in you the hope for solving problems that those of us who are graying have not been able to solve. So many things need changing in our education system.
We need better nutrition for our children.
We need more equitable opportunities in rural classrooms and in underserved urban schools.
We need more engaging curricula for young people—meaningful work for them to do while in school so that they learn to love learning, to find it energizing and empowering.
All of us need to understand how to serve all children so that kids with disabilities, kids who are recent immigrants, kids who are exceptionally bright can be successful. So, as we watch you walk out of the doors of Miller Hall, we vest in you our hope. We congratulate you on the great accomplishment that brings you here today and ask you to gather all your hope, your courage, your fortitude, and your passion so that you can bring important changes, strengthening changes, to bear in our pre-schools, our schools and universities. It is from you and the hope that you will build and the positive change that you will effect that we will derive our future inspiration.
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