The following is an adaptation of remarks delivered to students at an all-school assembly.
Once a month we assemble here, and for a few minutes we get to see what our whole community looks like together: from our Kindergarteners up here in the front all the way to our seniors somewhere there in the back, along with our whole faculty and staff. It’s during gatherings like this one that our community as such becomes sensible–it becomes tangible–and as we gather together, we should also think together about some of the principles and pursuits that we share in common. Today, as we have the Founding Fathers and the birth of our nation at the forefront of our minds, I want to take a few moments to remember especially our shared dedication to the principles of the American Founding and to our common pursuits of liberty and happiness.
What do the American Founding Fathers have to do with us? And in what sense do we take them as our models? We know that the project of the American Founders was above all to form a political order that would secure liberty and the possibility of happiness for every individual–in other words, to form a political order based on self-government. We also know of the dramatic history, the personal sacrifice, and the Revolutionary War that first established that government. But as inheritors of the Founders’ legacy, our task is not to establish this political order, but to continue it. And this presents us with a very practical difficulty: What are the proper and concrete means by which Americans can preserve a political order that is built upon the principles of self-government? How do we keep going, 250 years on? The Founders, of course, thought about this very question, and their answer was unanimous: they agreed that the most effective means for the continuation of the American republic would be education. Along these lines Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that “an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” And so at this school we strive together, in some small way, to continue the project that was begun by the American Founders themselves: the project of preserving a political order based on principles of self-government that can secure personal freedom and the pursuit of happiness for every citizen.
However, I am very aware that when I say the word “freedom,” the next word that pops into most of your heads is probably not “school.” But we have to remember that for the American Founders, freedom did not mean–and I say this emphatically–it did not mean the ability to do whatever we want. That is not self-government; it’s no government! I would suggest that, if anything, the Founders’ notion of freedom can be best understood in opposition to slavery: If slaves are those who are directed by others and for the sake of others, then the free are those who can direct themselves for their own sake. The freedom we dream of is the ability to direct the courses of our own lives; and it is precisely this self-direction that requires some knowledge of the truth. No one, after all, can direct themselves in the dark. I take it that this is also the notion of freedom that the great statesman and former slave Frederick Douglass was speaking of when he wrote, “Education…means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free.”
Nevertheless, while Truth may indeed be the light by which we can be free, light by itself gives no more than the vision of one’s destination–certainly it does not on its own provide us with the power to get there. For that we also need strength–virtus, as the Romans would have it. But that moral strength, that excellence of character which enables us to pursue the ends that Truth reveals, is not an in-born quality that we possess by nature. And so again, Frederick Douglass teaches us (listen to his beautiful words!): “There is fire in the flint and steel, but it is friction that causes it to flash, flame and burn, and give light where all else may be darkness. There is music in the violin, but the touch of the master is needed to fill the air and the soul with the concord of sweet sounds. There is power in the human mind, but education is needed for its development.”
So, if to be free is to direct ourselves to our own ends and on our own power, then, as it turns out, to be free is to live in truth and to be able to pursue the goods that truth reveals by the power and the strength of moral character. And this freedom is something that all of us seek, simply by virtue of our human nature; but as Americans, we have an additional obligation to pursue it. The fact that we are born into freedom means that we are responsible for developing that freedom into self-government by striving for truth and by strengthening our characters. So as we reflect on the founding principles of our nation over the next few weeks, I would challenge all of us here–and I include myself in this–not to shy away from the strenuous life that freedom requires, but to pursue both the light of truth and the strength of character that together give us the right to be our own masters.
