Graduation address: Professor Jason König
Thursday 27 June 2019
Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen, everyone.
First: congratulations. This is a special day. These are special moments in life when we get the chance to step back from everything and look back on what we have achieved.
There will have been times in your degree when day-to-day life felt like anything but a triumph: times when you struggled, when you found it hard to see everything in perspective.
Today, you can celebrate all you have accomplished through those months and years of hard work. The same goes for the family and friends who have been with you along the way. This is a special day for them too.
But this is also in a sense just the beginning. What matters in education is always what comes next, the way we use what we have learned in the present and the future.
That is one of the things we can learn from ancient Greek and Roman culture. I spend a lot of time in my research thinking about ancient education.
There are some spectacularly inappropriate models. Ancient education could be startlingly elitist, aimed primarily at young men from wealthy families. In some contexts we also find an unhealthy obsession with individual teachers as authority figures.
The orator Libanius writes in his autobiography about going to study in Athens in the fourth century CE. There was no such thing as a university in the modern sense in the late antique Mediterranean, but some big cities did have impressive concentrations of well-known philosophers and orators. Libanius had come to study with one particular teacher. He describes being kidnapped and imprisoned by the followers of one of the other professors until he agrees to change his allegiances. I always think that is a tempting model for Freshers’ Week: no need to waste all that time advising you into the right modules.
But there are other facets of ancient education that I think still have the capacity to set a very powerful example. I think that applies especially to the principle we find in a lot of ancient philosophical and biographical writing which tells us that the value of education comes from the way in which individual students and teachers respond to it in their own minds and in their own lives: education is a starting point for further exploration.
One of the most famous ancient expressions of that comes from a work by the philosopher Plutarch, from a work entitled On Listening: ‘For the mind’, he says, ’does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an urgent desire for the truth’.
He uses much less flattering imagery for bad listeners. In one passage he compares them with ‘unfledged nestlings, always gaping towards the mouth of another and wanting to receive everything ready prepared and predigested’. For Plutarch, listening well involves responding creatively and actively to the ideas you encounter.
Those images, and others like them, have a vast post-classical afterlife of misquotation and misattribution; they have also turned into clichés.
I was reminded of that recently when re-reading PG Wodehouse’s 1934 novel, Right Ho, Jeeves. That contains one of the most disastrous and funniest of all graduation speeches in modern fiction – that is the prize-giving speech given by Gussie Fink-Nottle at the Market Snodsbury Grammar School. In day-to-day life, he is a timid teetotaler. He is terrified by the prospect of speaking. In the hours before the ceremony, he drinks some whiskey to give him courage, and then some orange juice mix with gin without realising what it is. The result is a rhetorical comic masterpiece. He ends up insulting the headmaster along with various people in the audience, and he accuses one of the boys he is presenting a prize to of cheating in the Scripture Knowledge prize competition. I was watching my orange juice at lunch today very carefully.
But what I am particularly interested in for now is a moment in the previous chapter, where Jeeves is giving an account of his last-minute advice to the speaker. This is what he says: ‘I ventured to suggest that he might mention to the young gentlemen that education is a drawing out, not a putting in. The late Lord Brancaster was much addicted to presenting prizes at schools. And he invariably employed this dictum’.
That is a variant of the sentiment from Plutarch, especially the image they both reject which sees education as a process of filling a container. The motto Jeeves recommends is presented as a very conventional sentiment: it is what a sober speaker ought to say on this kind of occasion. Presumably it is meant to seem proper, but rather dull, and I am very much aware of that risk here. I am offering you a cliché, a traditional platitude.
But for me, what we get by looking back at ancient writing on education is a chance to recapture something of the freshness and power of that principle in its original context. I think you can see that in the extraordinary range of imagery Plutarch uses. In another passage, he tells us that good listeners should be like bees, working together as a community but also individually, transforming what they gather into honey: ‘when they have got something useful’, he says, ‘they fly away and get to work on it themselves’.
Of course, it is important to celebrate today, to look back on your education as something completed. But it is also important not to put it in a box and, not to assume that this is the end. The education you have been through in St Andrews is something ongoing; it is a starting-point for all the explorations and adventures that lie ahead of you.
Good luck. Thank you for all you have contributed in your time here. Congratulations again. Enjoy your day.
Professor Jason König
School of Classics