“Education Will Break Your Heart” (Alex Russo)
This is the season of commencement speeches. Most are forgettable but a few go beyond the familiar homilies of this annual ritual. Alexander Russo wrote about one that triggered many thoughts about my half-century involvement in school reform. Russo is a journalist who publishes “This Week in Education.” He also wrote about the turning around of Los Angeles’s Locke high school in “Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors:Fighting for the Soul of America’s Toughest High School.”
The best and most important commencement speech of the year was given by author Jonathan Franzen, not Conan O’Brian or Stephen Colbert. Franzen’s remarks at Kenyon College in Ohio were witty and smart like those of Conan and Colbert, but they were also much more intensely personal and human — and more powerful as a result. Even more importantly, they contained a message of great importance for educators and school reformers about how to tolerate such a daunting, heartbreaking endeavor.
In his speech, which the New York Times thought good enough to publish as an op-ed, Franzen delves into a key but usually unexamined issue around us: the psychological challenges of caring deeply about an issue that may or may not seem interesting or relevant or fixable to the rest of the world, and that may (probably) break our
The best and most important commencement speech of the year was given by author Jonathan Franzen, not Conan O’Brian or Stephen Colbert. Franzen’s remarks at Kenyon College in Ohio were witty and smart like those of Conan and Colbert, but they were also much more intensely personal and human — and more powerful as a result. Even more importantly, they contained a message of great importance for educators and school reformers about how to tolerate such a daunting, heartbreaking endeavor.
In his speech, which the New York Times thought good enough to publish as an op-ed, Franzen delves into a key but usually unexamined issue around us: the psychological challenges of caring deeply about an issue that may or may not seem interesting or relevant or fixable to the rest of the world, and that may (probably) break our