"YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL!" WHAT DAVID MCCULLOUGH'S COMMENCEMENT SPEECH MEANS TO ME

We are becoming a nation addicted to grades, rewards, and awards. School is about "What'd you get?" rather the an "What'd you learn?" We have failed to instill a love of learning in most of our students. 

We drown them in a sea of papers and goodies attesting to their "good grades." The "paper chase" is no longer a pursuit of the pages of great books and what they contain, but the computer-generated, multicolored awards doled out daily all over our nation. Some are posted on refrigerators at home, some litter the school halls and grounds. All intend to motivate or reward students by emphasizing that some students are better than others. 

We forget that there are large numbers of students who go ignored because, for a variety of reasons often beyond their control, they are not better. These less-rewarded students become convinced by their consistent failure to achieve that they are, in some way they cannot comprehend, less worthy and defective. Many become discipline problems, and we seem surprised.

I shamelessly quote out-of-context, Wellesley High School English teacher David McCullough, Jr.’s faculty speech to the Class of 2012 last Friday. His "you are not special" commencement address has caused quite a stir. Nevertheless, Mr. McCullough "gets it."


"You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another–which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it… Now it’s “So what does this get me?”


No reward or award can replace the motivation of a love of knowledge. Rewards get in the way of that love in ways that are insidiously unseen. Mr. McCullough "gets it." Again, I quote:


"... the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special.

                            Because everyone is."


Make ALL of your students feel special. You may be the only person who ever does. 

Video and Text of David McCullough's speech