Graduation Speech

Graduation Speech

by Sydney Coffin

157 years ago my own ancestor, Lucretia Coffin Mott, risked imprisonment for helping Jane Johnson secure her freedom from slavery under a politician visiting the city of Philadelphia from the state of North Carolina, where it was illegal to even teach a black person to read or write. Today, despite all our best efforts, Jane Johnson’s descendents attend a school district, and even a higher education system, suffering from, as Martin Luther King once said, “insufficient funds”.

So it is with great caution that I let you in on something you already know: children everywhere are embarking on a dangerous but sacred journey. As we send them out into the world with the beginnings of skills, the beginnings of learning, a taste of knowledge and a small hint of the bigger picture before them, we risk not just losing them to the streets of North, South, West, or Southwest, but also to the dorms of Cheyney, Lincoln, or Millersville, or to the subway that will take them North and East to Lincoln Technical Institute, or downtown to Spring Garden Street and the Community College of Philadelphia. Many families take a risk just sending them out to the corner store or leaving children when going to work just about every day, but with each young student we risk giving them over to a grand experiment that was illegal to Frederick Douglass, forbidden to Harriet Tubman, outlawed even to many of yours.

Is a little education that dangerous? Malcolm X once said “No one will get anywhere without an education in this world”; President Barack Obama has followed with the words “Be the change you wish to see”. So today I challenge you to change the way we all see education: no longer will classes be required of you graduates by the state of Pennsylvania; instead you may or may not choose to attend classes in anything from our mutual history, the math that some use to calculate your worth, or learn to read the laws that imprisoned some of your ancestors, and possibly will imprison your peers and family members. No longer will you have to wake up or stay late to learn that Spanish or Arabic is complicated, or Physical Science and Geometry require practice, or reading and writing require patience and history requires dedication and inquiry.

Instead you are free to go: take your diploma from University City High School and walk away. Never read a newspaper with open eyes and a critical mind, never write a letter that asks “not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country”. Don’t do the math. Instead, add up what you can save by studying the balance on a bank account you may or may not open with money you may or may not have. Instead, go: go out into the world and learn from your education in our neighborhoods that life is hard, that it is not always fair, and that it requires a tremendous amount of work and labor, as much if not more so than some of your ancestors who were forbidden to learn to read and write 275 years ago in this country.

Or maybe, just maybe, change the way you look at education. This school was built about 40 years ago on the destruction of homes in a neighborhood called The Bottom; some people called this section of Philadelphia “Up South”. Today, in University City, we are within walking distance of an Ivy League school from which many of our teachers graduated but to which few of you have even considered applying. Nonetheless, our school is within a metropolitan area possessing over 65 colleges, universities, and trade schools, some of which would love to have you in their classes. In fact, this year there are more young, gifted, and black women of college-ready age than ever before in the history of time. When you go to your next class, next year, in a few years, or over the next few years, seize the opportunity to learn solutions to life’s challenges, solve the problems you and our entire community face, and come back to teach us how you did it.

I personally failed out of one high school following the end of my tenth grade year; I dropped out of college after two years and it took me 8 more years to graduate, enrolling first in one class at a time at Temple University while I worked during the daytime. I was not the best student, and I am not a perfect teacher, but we are all learning how to better do what we need to do. You are all very bright; all of you. You had the ability to survive this school in this period in time, when others did not make it with you. Continue to survive, continue to flourish, continue to succeed, as best you can. Just as one philosopher put it, “Anything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.

Return to this place of strength and learning not just in our school, or in our community, but this place of learning inside your own soul. Just as some people were told not to read or write, you will be told, sometimes by yourself, sometimes by others, sometimes by the circumstances of time, that you cannot do something. You can! You can learn how to. It takes a lot of dedication, it takes a lot of labor, it takes a lot of love and devotion. You have an equal amount of that love and devotion from each of us here to see you graduate today.

People ask me how I like teaching and I say “it’s the toughest job you’ll ever love.” There is never a dull moment, and I am constantly passionate for learning how to do it better. We all want you to learn how best to do what You want to do, and how best to be Yourself, whoever that is, so use the education, however flawed and imperfect it has been, to go out and learn more, and come back to show us what you did, and how you did it. I know you can. Whether you are from Northwest or Southwest, Bangladesh, North Africa, Saudi Arabia or Egypt, Haiti or the Dominican Republic, your friends and relatives, and even your ancestors and mine know you can. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t. If they do, teach them how you can.

Sydney Coffin teaches senior English, manages senior projects, and teaches poetry at University City High School Promise Academy in West Philadelphia. He originally wrote this piece for the University City High School commencement in 2012. Sydney has participated in professional development with the Philadelphia Writing Project for the past two years at University City High School and was part of the 2012 Invitational Summer Institute.