As a teacher, it has been my good fortune to wait on and to wait for the leaders of tomorrow all my life. In a deeply cherished destiny spanning more than a quarter century, I have followed the progress of our children from kindergarten to university and beyond to positions of high leadership dedicated to the service of our beloved country.
In faith, in anticipation, I have traced the development of myriad personal narratives- of hope and of dreams, of innocence and of experience, of fear and of anxiety. Above all, I have celebrated the idealism and the creative energy that our youth hold in such abundance and with such promise.
That is the reason why I have waited with much anticipation to meet withy you today. I am grateful to the organisers for the largeness of your heart to allow me a little space for a little conversation with the leaders of tomorrow.
“Go out to learn, come in to serve”, the wise ones said. Today, I celebrate with your parents the fulfilment of an old promise. You fill this hall with your presence. But, more importantly, you fill our hearts with joy and with pride.
Leaders of tomorrow, who you are and what you have achieved, you owe it to your parents and to your country. Where you stand today and where you want to go from here, you owe it to yourself.
Many thousand little girls and little e boys of your generation joined school together with you in PP over two decades ago. Only a fraction of that multitude has forged on and completed graduation this year. So many fell by the way- some owing to factors for which they would have been responsible, others due to circumstances over which they had no control.
So many sacred dreams crashed on the streets of far-away lands. One crash was too many, one life too precious. So many cherished hopes were dashed in the glamour, the glitter and the litter of lien cities. And one hope dashed was one hope crushed too many. What remains today is only a memory.
But you are here today. And that makes all the difference. You have not only come home from around the world all in one piece, but you have brought home t gifts of many land. You brought home nothing less than the gold of Cuba, the gold of Sri Lanka and the gold of India. You distinguished yourselves, stood out in the crowds and brought honour to our country. I offer to you my commendations from the bottom of my heart.
It wasn’t fair to expect every one of you top collect all the gold from around the world. But, certainly, all of you have brought home treasures of different kind- you mined the core of your universities and colleges and discovered the soul of your seats of learning. If you came back with the intellectual treasures that animate and sustain the life of scholars and of universities, you brought gold to your country. I offer to you my commendations from the bottom of heart.
The intellectual endeavours of many continents, regions and countries, including our own, are sampled in this congregation. As I mentioned in the little note that I sent personally to you (I could not locate every one’s address!) some ti9me ago, every seat of learning has its own special life.
It is to discover this unique life and how it is expressed in the programmes the university or college offers that scholars come from far and wide. Whether as government scholars or as privately-sponsored scholars, your mission was the same- to get to the heart of your discipline.
Today, I have been asked to share my views on a very complex issue- education and values. I have accepted the challenge not because I am particularly qualified to speak on such a difficult topic, but because I cannot think of education without thinking of values in the same breadth. What is important about values though is that they are not so much to be talked about as lived out. And they operate at all levels- individual, institutional, social, national, and international.
In my scheme of things, values refer to the normative frame that human beings develop to distinguish between categories of right or wrong, truth or falsehood, moral or immoral, or simply good or bad. We have, in the course or our evolution, built a range of notions and beliefs that have now evolved as convenient constructs to define our ethical orientation and guide our life.
Education is all about the cultivation of the entire dimension of individual – physical, social, intellectual, cultural, spiritual, psychological, moral, aesthetic, emotional, personal, and other spheres. It is a process for the wakening and sharpening of one’s sensitivities and sensibilities- such that an individual becomes “more seeing, more hearing, and, above all, more feeling’, as in the language of Joseph Conrad. As a normative endeavour, education is an invitation that gently draws the human mind to look for and to love what is True, and Good and Beautiful.
Look into the heart of all your fields of study. In each of them, there is the grace of great ideas that nurtures and sustains of time and space. What is science but infinite dance of nature? Humanities or liberal arts are an attempt of the human mind to celebrate the unending search for perfection and the limitless configurations of social relations. Philosophy is but an excuse for our undying yearning for the eternal and the immutable.
If this were not the case, we would have stopped teaching science and arts and commerce and allied disciplines long ago. I hope you have discovered a reason for electing to pursue a field beyond the prescribed topics and the chapters in your subjects.
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