The Great James Baldwin on the power of education, society and thought
In these days of graduations and turmoil, I believe any one who openly listens can take comfort in his clarity and truth.
Baldwin helps us feel why we must remember the soul of the nation. And that through thought, we are never broken, never, when we save the soul of our nation.
People can't always explain the soul of the nation, but they know it when they see it. And we are helped together when we help them think it through in our society's public discourse.
A Rule of Law society rules through the word, not through men.
No buts. When the citizens stop talking, the guns start walking.
"...speaking now as though I were your educator, as though I were your teacher. My responsibility to you would be to invest you with all of the morale that I could to prepare you for the terrible storm which is called life -- terrible and beautiful. But you must know that it is both. And you don't quite know it and it is my responsibility to make you know it. It is my responsibility, also, speaking as your educator, to give you as true a version of your history as I can, since it is through your sense of your own history that you arrive at your identity. and no one has arrived at a sense of his own identity without it. That is why ancestors are important.
We, all of us here now, are livinging through a certain kind of turmoil which endangers all of our relationships. This turmoil is sometimes describea as racial. We can use that word for the moment. But it is really not racial. It is historical and it is personal.
Let me speak again about the aims of a society as opposed now to the aims of an education. The aims of a society are, and always must be, to inculcate in its citizens a certain sense of security, and to discourage its citizens from disturbing the peace. Now this is a necessity, and it is even an admirable necessity because we cannot live without society. And society as a fact, is a beautiful creation.
Nevertheless it is also equally true that all societies have been brought into existence very painfully and very slowly by men. And that the people who are responsible for the creation of societies must forever ask questions, all questions, take nothing whatever for granted, because that is only way the frontiers of the world fall back, and the world as I said before begins to be enlarged.
So what it means that those societies are under the obligation to educate all of its citizens; it is also under the obligation to discourage people from thinking too much.
Now this is where all of you come in..."