A Valediction: Forbidding Ignorance

By Matthew Patterson

Many of my classmates are probably not surprised to hear that I spent a lot of my childhood hearing, “You’re too smart for your own good.” Teachers, relatives, my parents, other people my age, telephone solicitors... well, anyway, I heard it a lot. And I’m sure a lot of other people have, too – sayings like “you’re getting too big for your britches” or “you’re ten going on twenty-three” permeate a lot of our childhood memories. Recently, when I was traveling around the country for college visits, I heard the same thing from a percussion professor for whom I auditioned. "It sounds to me like you're too smart to be a music major," he said at one point. Beyond the fact that I was incredibly dumbstruck that he would actually say something like that DURING THE AUDITION, something about the way he put it just felt wrong. Not wrong in that he broke some grammatical rule or misused a word, but that his statement was by definition incorrect, incompatible with the proper functioning of the universe.

So I went back home, and thought, and when I got that college's rejection letter I thought a bit more, and I think I'm finally beginning to realize what it is about that professor's proclamation that unnerved me so. Beyond the obvious, that by his definition musicians must not be very intelligent, I think his words betray a lack of knowledge about the very basics of what it means to live.

Any living thing has to make the best possible use of the traits it has in order to have the best possible life. Human beings differ from all the other creatures in the specific feature of our advanced intelligence. Physically, let's face it, we're puny. If the apes ever got the idea in their heads to get rid of us, we'd be gone in a week, and the world would start to look like one of those dystopian films we're always watching in science fiction class. However, being alive for a human doesn't just mean failing to die. Because of this defining trait, for a human to truly be *alive* means that he must take advantage of this intelligence as fully as possible. Therefore, it is never possible to be too smart for anything, because it is never possible to be too alive.

So what does this mean for us, the class of 2003, we who are about to set ourselves upon the world? I'm still not entirely sure. I may never be. At least one thing I know we can all take from it, though, is that this kind of thinking is not only wrong, but dangerous. If you repeat a message enough times, eventually people will start believing it. This idea that you can be somehow “too smart” for something has the effect of confining one’s intelligence to a box where it cannot grow or flourish. They’ll tell you that means you’ve succeeded, when you’re so specialized that you don’t care about anything other than one specific thing. This is a lie. All you have done is to close off any possibilities of growing into something greater. Limiting your knowledge and your capacity for understanding in this manner ultimately makes you less human.

This world of 2003 and beyond will be the world of our choosing. Our actions can bring it revolution or plunge it further into disarray. All I can ask is that we who will decide its fate remember that, as human beings, our lives and our fortunes depend on our minds and our intelligence more than anything else. No matter what some professors may say, it is *never* possible to be too smart, to somehow participate too much in the one thing that makes us uniquely human. When we all become as fully human as it is possible to be – when we all take as much advantage of our brains and skills as possible – on that day, we will all shine together.

Now then. One of the other things I always got told was to always thank people for what they’ve given you. With this in mind, I have just a few more things to say:

To my parents: There aren’t enough words to say what needs saying here. Sometimes, language just fails. I would not be who I am without your examples. I would not *be*, period. Thanks and gratitude aren’t sufficient, but they’re the only words I have for what I feel. Be assured, you made a difference, and I love you greatly for it.

To all our teachers: I honestly doubt whether I will ever see again another group of men and women so professional, so dedicated to what they do, even in the face of occasional fits of what must seem to be truly massive apathy. Seriously, though, time and again you have gone absolutely above and beyond the simple instructional role. You guided us, nurtured us, protected us. You have attempted to instill in us the most important value there is: that a life lived without questions, without knowledge, is not really a life at all. Lecturing is just a boring recitation of facts, but real teaching… that involves a sharing of the self. You have given of yourselves freely, a gift we can never match or repay. Our highest thanks and praise to you for it.

Finally, to the class of 2003 itself: I like to think I saved the best for last. I have had a relatively short time at Episcopal compared to some of you, only four and a half years. My only real regret is that I did not take the time to know all of you as well as I could have, and should have. I cannot say that I have ever been right in the thick of student activities and student life, and perhaps in this I was in error, because it means I will never know exactly how much of a difference you all could have made in my life, and in the world at large. I *do* know, however, that I could not have handpicked a better group of people with whom to experience all the indecisions and revisions of high school. No matter how we have chosen to show it – in sports or scholarship, in acolyting or anarchy, in physics or poetry – we are all examples of people who live by the principle that one can never know too much or succeed in too many different areas. If we can carry this throughout our lives, I cannot even begin to imagine how incalculably wonderful our world will become. If we can avoid the trap of limiting intelligence, of putting our minds in a box, there will be no end to the tremendous things we will accomplish.

This was my valedictorian speech, delivered Friday, May 17, 2003, in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd of Episcopal High School, at approximately 7:40 PM.

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