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Unschooling Valedictorian

Have you seen this yet? A high school valedictorian speaking out against schooling / The System in her commencement address:

I saw this posted around Facebook over the last few days, and Teacher Tom had it on his blog. I thought I was going to love it, but for some reason it's just making me a bit cranky. Can't quite put my finger on why.

Your thoughts?

Tags: graduation, school, speeches, unschooling

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Permalink Reply by hermit crab on August 16, 2010 at 5:26pm

Your link didn't work. Here's a transcript of her speech.

I don't know, I feel a lot of patience for people in this life stage. I was the "poet laureate" at my high school graduation (that right there is private schoolin for ya) and I read a poem I wrote about losing my virginity. 17-18 year olds don't have the most awesome grasp of nuance or subtlety.

At the same time, this got repetitive and melodramatic pretty darn quick. My favorite part was the shout out to the rare avant garde 10th grade English teacher. They really aren't as rare as she seems to think. Is there actually a high school anywhere without an avant garde 10th grade English teacher?

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Permalink Reply by jenra on August 16, 2010 at 5:27pm

Maybe because she seems whiney about the education she received and her speech is rife with unproven theories and quotes people with apparent paranoid personality disorders? "It's all the government, man! They want to keep you down!"

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Permalink Reply by mcglory13 on August 16, 2010 at 5:35pm

It's the corollary to the many, many essays I read about Ayn Rand. I appreciate the student is thinking about it, but the argument is unsophisticated and lacks nuance. She is also basically telling her teachers and administrators (none of whom got into this for the big bucks) to fuck off. Not to mention that it is all well and good to learn things, but you need to be able to demonstrate mastery of the skills and information you've learned and to be like YOUR EXAM IS OPPRESSING ME misses the point. She should join a organic farming commune.

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Permalink Reply by Kiwi on August 16, 2010 at 5:40pm

I'm not sure what it was about it but it just rubbed me the wrong way. I think part of it is that she didn't give a nod to how fortunate she was to have gotten the education that lead her to be able to give that caliber of speech.

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Permalink Reply by Floor Pie on August 16, 2010 at 5:42pm

HC, now that's a graduation speech I want to see on YouTube!

I can be a lot more forgiving of the idealistic teen than I can of the adults who are heralding this video as something groundbreaking. Haven't we seen this trope before in Say Anything? Reality Bites? Heck, it's even in the new Twilight movie. I watch this and I just know Rayanne and Jordan Catalano put her up to it...

Good grief, I'm growing cynical in my old age...

.

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Permalink Reply by Kiwi on August 16, 2010 at 5:54pm

Floor Pie said:

I watch this and I just know Rayanne and Jordan Catalano put her up to it...
.

The creator of MSCL is behind a new show on ABC Family called Huge. It is actually rather decent.

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Permalink Reply by mcglory13 on August 16, 2010 at 5:59pm

" And they wonder why those of us in our twenties...
refuse to work an 80-hour week...
just so we can afford to buy their BMWs...
why we aren't interested...
in the counterculture that they invented...
as if we did not see them disembowel their revolution...
for a pair of running shoes.
But the question remains...
what are we going to do now?
How can we repair all the damage we inherited?
Fellow graduates, the answer is simple.
The answer is...
The answer is...
I don't know."

God I love that movie so much, even though I know Tory and Lelaina lasted like, a week, after they got together.

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Permalink Reply by mcglory13 on August 16, 2010 at 7:09pm

Ah, typo. Troy. Tory and Lelaina would be an entirely different movie. :)

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Permalink Reply by Daria on August 16, 2010 at 7:10pm

I sometimes refer to such discussions in my own life as the Dawson's Creek complex. I think this is because I didn't watch enough TV earlier in my life, so for some reason, Joey is my reference point. (Sidebar: I miss the old Katie Holmes). But at some point, don't you get tired of thinking about EVERYTHING? And you just have to live. Of course, since some of my most recent thought has been devoted to food, I can't even eat (necessary for living) without thinking. I hate Michael Pollen sometimes.

Our graduation speakers were elected without regard to grades and were an excellent cross-section of our class and they were all friends of mine. Thinking back, that is a pretty cool memory.

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Permalink Reply by kommishoner on August 17, 2010 at 9:54am

Hmm. I thought it was okay. The notion of a valedictorian speaking out against conventional schooling does rub me the wrong way - it reminds me of a professor in law school who told my first-year contracts class, at a second-tier state school with a vicious curve, that he didn't understand why we were so stressed out about our grades, and how much better he liked the pass/fail system they used when he was in law school at Yale. Well, yeah dude, because when you graduate from Yale they don't give a flying fuck about your GPA because you went TO YALE.

So it feels a bit like this valedictorian is looking at her bright shiny future and giving her classmates the consolation prize of her acknowledging it came from a stupid system. But, like HC, I have a lot of patience for kids at this age - and she's right, the system is stupid, and it sets everyone except people like her up to fail, and feel less-than. I'll give her some credit for acknowledging that.

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Permalink Reply by GreenLantern on August 17, 2010 at 10:50am

I actually really like what she had to say. There are a lot of things she said that are spot on. I'm not a fan of public school, so I know I'm in the minority here. What I like is that she's analyzing what she went through as a product of the public school system, and what she says is part of what I was trying to get a cross in some other post I did. It seems to be she and her parents worship at the Libertarian table, which is fine. I think it's admirable that she's able to think about her situation like this and speak about it in her graduation speech.