Graduation Address 2011
Good morning!
Mr. Marston, Mr. McLeod, faculty and staff colleagues, trustees, parents,
guests, friends, alumni, and Seniors of the Class of 2011: Welcome to the
10th ZIS Graduation!
Today I would like to speak to you about something near and dear to my
own heart: the Arts or, perhaps more accurately, the creative temperament
and its importance for you and us. Why the Arts? Well, apart from some
intensely personal reasons, here‟s what prompted the choice of this theme:

The vast majority of today‟s Graduates have been involved in the Arts for
many years at ZIS – and I don‟t mean just through coursework; as
exemplary musicians, singers, actors, painters, photographers, sculptors,
they have astonished us with their creativity.

I heard Professor of Education Diane Ravitch and the Boston Pops
Maestro Keith Lockhart speak eloquently and passionately about the Arts
– and the fact that they might become an endangered species in schools.

Sir Ken Robinson has urged repeatedly that future-oriented models of
education abandon 19th century industrial thinking and place creativity at
the center of the curriculum instead. He invokes the power of imagination
as the means through which our children ought to “learn for the test of
life” rather than for a “life of tests.”
Graduation Address 2011
Page 1

Lastly there are two memorable pronouncements by John Dewey which
capture the essence of what I want to say to you today: “Art,” he wrote,
“is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters,
musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.” And
“…as long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor
civilization is secure.” For Dewey the Arts define our essential humanity
and represent the guardians of civilization itself.
Our school has always had a strong Arts program, except that 25 years ago
there was no music in the school. That didn‟t seem right to me, so I hired a
talented young intern from Brown University and we were off to an
enthusiastic – even if somewhat cacophonous beginning. Since then Music,
the third pillar of our Arts program, has become an indispensable part of the
school‟s curriculum. Our students participate regularly in music festivals all
over the world, and Middle and Upper School musical productions have
culminated most recently in the finest such productions ever at our school,
Fiddler on the Roof, Les Misérables, and Honk! And if you attended ZIS Arts
Festivals, you found yourself in the presence of truly exceptional artistic
talent. At ZIS, it seems, the Arts are alive and well!
But, are they just decorations in the “beauty parlor of civilization”, a nice-tohave to give the kids a break, as it were, from “serious” academic study
such as Mathematics, Science, or Languages?
Our technology-dominated world calls for more engineers and scientists
because, we are told, without them we cannot solve the complex problems
we face in the 21st century and we won‟t be able to “compete” successfully
Graduation Address 2011
Page 2
with China, India, and other rising nations. Besides, if we look at the matter
pragmatically the statistics speak for themselves: engineers will earn a lot
more during their career than artists, who, unless they turn out to be Andy
Warhols, Luciano Pavarottis, Yo Yo Mas, or Tom Stoppards, might even have
to work in a “real” job – as teachers or waiters, for example!
It is an unfortunate fact that financial support for the Arts in schools has
eroded significantly, and one might be forgiven to suspect that our obsession
with standardized test scores as a measure of a school‟s success has
contributed to this development. The Arts, it is often argued, do not develop
or measure the skills and knowledge students will need in the future. As
soon as the latest PISA results are released, national authorities scramble to
explain away deficiencies in their educational system, celebrate gains over
other national systems, deplore the supposedly poor quality of teachers, and
announce that more rigor in mathematics is urgently needed.
The attention which we pay to these scores, the manner in which they are
used, and tight economic times have spelled trouble for many Arts programs
across the U.S. and Europe. And, let‟s be honest, if funds were scarce, how
many among you would agree to cut back on Mathematics or Science before
eliminating an art class here or a theater or music class there? I am not sure
I‟d have the courage to stand up before you and announce such a choice –
unless, of course, I was VERY close to retirement! Though, I am also sorely
tempted to let Einstein speak for me: “…not everything that can be counted
counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Graduation Address 2011
Page 3
Keith Lockhart, for one, has made up his mind: “…I am prepared to stand up
and declare that education in music and the arts is essential, and a right for
all of our young people….FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS….”
Lockhart‟s “wrong reasons” challenge the utilitarian view of our world
according to which economic usefulness defines progress, and academic
subjects are divided into the “useful and the useless.” As teachers I fear we
often unwittingly lend credibility to this unfortunate notion when we
complain that students “will be missing school” if they participate in
festivals, rehearsals, or recitals which take them out of other classes. Has
the Age of Donald Trump finally supplanted the Age of Pericles?
Of course, even if we are sympathetic to the utilitarian perspective, we
might want to question the contention that the Arts do not prepare you for
the future: if, in order to tackle the challenges looming on our planetary
horizon, you need to be motivated, disciplined, self-reflecting learners, team
workers, risk-takers, and out-of-the-box, imaginative thinkers – well then,
how would training in the Arts fall short of nurturing these skills and habits
of mind? Can you think of a better example of consummate ensemble work,
overarching purpose, and individual talent blending with beauty and grace in
the pursuit of excellence than a successful theater or concert performance?
We might also dare ask why artists are not likely to become leaders of
nations? Is it because they are considered naïve in the ways of the world, or
potentially dangerous and subversive? Chinese artist Ai WeiWei‟s recent
arrest and disappearance is an ominous reminder of this. Theirs is not a
language which conforms to existing norms; when they do conform or are
Graduation Address 2011
Page 4
forced to conform by totalitarian regimes they condemn themselves to
oblivion. True artists study norms to redefine them, transcend them – or
rebel against them. They question “things as they are”, and confront us with
alternative ways of seeing and interpreting our world.
Max Frisch, the notable Swiss writer, tells a wonderful story of an
Ambassador who asks a Leningrad museum curator to show him art works
hidden by the Soviet authorities who did not approve of them. His
persistence pays off and he is allowed to see a single painting by a
modernist Russian painter which depicts nothing but a black square on a
white canvas. The Ambassador intimates to the curator that he should not
be afraid to exhibit the painting since people would consider it trash anyway
by comparison with works celebrating Socialist and State achievements. The
curator responds: “You are wrong. The people would not understand the
painting, to be sure, but they would realize that there was something else
beyond Socialist and State achievements…”
Artists make us see the unfamiliar beneath the familiar, the “something
else”. They turn our sights, as John Berger puts it, from the “habitual which
confirms us” to “a part of the visible [world] which wasn‟t destined for us”.
This perspective may be uncomfortable, unsettling, political even – but it is
also incredibly stirring. We felt that with Vedran Smailovic who played his
cello among the ruins of his civil war-ravaged Sarajevo; or recently in Rome
when the central choral piece “Oh my country, so beautiful and so lost” in
Verdi‟s opera Nabucco turned into a stunning protest against the Berlusconi
government‟s cuts of Arts subsidies; I experienced it during a performance
of Les Misérables in London shortly after the Berlin wall had come down,
when the audience spontaneously leapt to their feet, mesmerized by the Can
Graduation Address 2011
Page 5
You Hear the People Sing chorus. There is power – and dangerous beauty in
this.
Flannery O‟Connor reminds us that the Arts and the artistic temperament
must stand outside or challenge established systems: “…we must push back
as hard as the age that pushes against us”. Emile Zola would have
concurred: “I am an artist…I am here to live out loud,” he wrote. I suspect
we actually do grasp the truth intuitively when we attribute our inability to
solve the world‟s most urgent problems to “a failure of the imagination.” For
imagination to flourish there must be a tolerance for ambiguity and
„dissidence‟; there must be a culture in which existing norms and
assumptions can be called into question, and in which the limits of thought
are defined only by our imagination.
In a keynote speech delivered at the recent IBO Conference in Melbourne,
Dame Evelyn Glennie, possibly the world‟s most renowned solo percussionist
and, by the way, almost completely deaf, asked her audience a provocative
question: “What sound am I?” “What sound am I?” It is a simple but
profound question which you, Seniors, might want to ask yourselves on this
day. And perhaps you should add two others: “What sound am I going to
make in my world?” and “what difference will this make to others?” These
questions differ fundamentally from “what should I study?” and “what career
shall I pursue?” It‟s a choice between adopting the language of imagination
and moral responsibility and an economic vocabulary which focuses on the
useful, sensible, and profitable.
Graduation Address 2011
Page 6
Now, don‟t get me wrong. I am not suggesting you should all seek your
fortunes by becoming artists -- though happily I know that a few among you
will do just that. Our world needs engineers, scientists, business men and
women, politicians and so on, and an argument which implies that only
artists are creative is, of course, false. I dare say, however, that our world
might look quite different if you, our future leaders, cultivate the habits of
mind, the appreciation of beauty, and the moral sensibility inherent in the
arts. Perhaps this is what Steve Jobs alluded to when he said “technology
alone is not enough…it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with
humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing….”
Have we prepared you for this challenge? The future will tell, but perhaps
the following will strike a chord with you, so to speak:
1. Live out loud. Find your authentic voice, the sound which is distinctively
you and do not hesitate to be heard. Say what you believe in. Yet never
allow your own loudness to silence or drown out the voices of others.
Sing the Song of Yourself, “sound your barbaric yawp over the roofs of
the world”, but be sure that just as in an orchestra your “sound” serves a
shared, ennobling purpose and does not degenerate into narcissistic selfindulgence. And do not forget to laugh frequently – even if only at
yourself.
2. Embrace the audacity of imagination (another John Dewey expression),
or, as Eleanor Roosevelt said: do one thing every day which scares you.
Step outside your comfort zone. When you encounter the startling, the
uncommon, welcome it and do not fall victim to the convenient axiom
that the “exception merely proves the rule.” It is a straight-jacket
Graduation Address 2011
Page 7
designed to perpetuate stale patterns of thinking and dull our sensibilities
to the “something else” knocking on our doors.
3. Be uncomfortable – rather than comfortably numb. Kick-start your brains
and, like Steve Jobs, “make a dent in the universe.” This might sound
arrogant in an age where our footprints are making rather large – and
damaging – dents in the universe. But there are creative “dents” which
we need to make to reshape our economic, political, intellectual, or
educational landscape. Such forays into discomfort require courage,
foresight, vision, and a willingness to risk failure. We, your parents, will
be there to catch you if you stumble.
4. Think and act like artists. Perfect your skills, firmly ground your
understanding of things, but do not allow knowledge to overpower your
intuition. The Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis put it this way:”Do
what needs doing and then ask whether it is possible”. Remember that
what you create rather than what you manage will survive you and that
you, the „artist‟ inside you, are indeed the guardian of civilization itself.
Keith Lockhart concluded his speech last December with a passionate
reminder: “Without the joy of music, there’s no point in life, unless life to
you is no sound at all.”
So, Seniors, make your music, let us hear your voices, let us hear your
songs, and let us be amazed by the places to which imagination will lead
you! Congratulations Seniors of the ZIS Class of 2011!
Peter C. Mott
June 2011
Graduation Address 2011
Page 8