by Alex Loomis

Mic check, one two...Yo, is Lincoln-Sudbury in da House? Yo, I can’t hear ya, I said is Lincoln-Sudbury in da House?
I apologize for that...abnormal introduction, but standing here today, I am overwhelmed. We’ve just come so far since Freshman Orientation in September 2004. We are the first class to have spent four years in the new school, we’ve experienced high points and lows, we’ve had some insane times, and we’ve gotten to know each other. We’ve made new friendships, some of which will last forever, others will fade with time as we rise to do great things. However, somewhere in there, there is something that, crazily enough, often goes forgotten at high school graduations. I’m talking about the achievement that graduation actually commemorates: the fact that we have received an education.
Perhaps the reason graduations avoid the subject is because it’s so difficult to define. What is an education anyway? Four years spent in high school, 3 in middle school, and 5 in elementary school, but what has been the goal of these 12 years? Is it just college prep? Have all our tears and sweat over these four years been pointless, just an exercise before we get to real life. Now that’s a dismal thought for graduation, but it’s the picture that emerges when one reads accounts of education in The Boston Globe or US News and World Report. In those periodicals, high school is presented as a means to college: a tool to get from point A to point B. It’s a college admissions instrument whose efficacy can be measured by such objective terms as SAT, ACT, AP, and IB scores. The obvious example is Newsweek, whose list of the “Top 100 High Schools in the United States” is calculated by taking the number of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests taken by the school divided by the graduating senior class. Quantifying education has never seemed so easy. I’ll step back and ask the obvious question: How in God’s name did the editors of Newsweek devise this system? Even if we ignore the obvious logical flaw in that it does not even look at the scores that the students receive, this system still does not make sense. From a college admissions standpoint, L-S is ranked somewhere around 1000th in the nation, yet this year, in terms of the “big name” schools, we have students going to UC Berkeley, Stanford, CalTech, MIT, every single Ivy league school, and the top liberal arts schools in the country. But even when you measure Lincoln-Sudbury’s success in terms of colleges and not tests taken, you still miss something.
The fact that we even would think to measure the value of an education in terms of test scores or college acceptances shows us that there is something fundamentally wrong with society today. A high school education isn’t a collection of statistics: these might describe some aspect of the nation as a whole, but they certainly doesn’t describe the educational value of high school. Statistics such as those will not explain to you the questions raised after reading The Brothers Karamazov in a Russian Literature class, nor can they adequately describe the inspiration gained after reading Nietzsche in Philosophy class. Statistics such as these don’t do justice to the feeling you get holding a first place debate trophy in front of a crowded lecture hall at Harvard University. Statistics such as those make a mockery of the excitement you feel when you find out your friends just won the National Ocean Science Bowl Championship, or when you discover multiple L-S teams are DCL champs, or award-winning musicians, or among the best newspaper editors in all of New England. Statistics such as those do not convey the sense of wonder and belonging you feel from seeing the Lincoln-Sudbury community come together in times of crisis, whether it means raising money for victims of natural disasters, or simply mourning and comforting each other when tragedy strikes and we lose members of our community. None of these experiences were simply “exercises” or “means to an end.” That wasn’t a preparation for life; that is life! We have lived!
Class of 2008, L-S has taught us to recognize the value in such individual experiences, but we mustn’t forget our time here as we move forward in life. We mustn’t look back on our non-standardized public high school as a quaint vestige of a bygone era of flower children strumming banjos in hallways. Truth be told, we as a society have become too career-oriented. Not only is high school seen as a stepping stone to college, college is seen in turn as a stepping stone to an idealized lucrative career. In short, America has lost its heart and soul. We are lucky to have received a real education, one based on teaching students to think critically and act independently, not simply to score well on tests. When education is overtaken by careerism, we only learn in school how to get a job and perform well in a career. When pure education remains intact as it does at L-S, learning is no longer a matter of having class discussions so as to pass a test so as to get a job. It’s about having class discussions so as to learn for learning’s sake. When education is a means to an end, we only learn to function in society, but when education is an ends in and of itself, we not only learn to function in society, we also learn to create society.
Not many students in the nation are so lucky as to receive such an unrestricted education. We are extremely fortunate to have had the number of class options we did in History, English, and the Arts. Such freedom of education allows greater freedom of thought, and thus a freedom of opportunity that many do not have. Frederick Douglas was not wrong when he observed, “Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude,” but we should not let the uniqueness of our education perturb us. Instead, we must use our freedom to avoid the allure of soulless careerism. Not only should we resist the urge ourselves, we must do what we can to halt and reverse the societal trend. In short, we must remember the words of the German author Herman Hesse: “The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in the process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again.”