Graduation Speech for the OGS Class of 2004, June 10, 2004

By R.E. Mark Lee

Thank you, Ellen Hall, for inviting me to speak at this the 29^th year of the Oak Grove School and to you, our 18^th graduating class.

It is common in giving graduation speeches to tell the graduates funny stories, give serious advice, tell you how to live, and say goodbye with wishes for your successful future life.

I want to deviate from that pattern of a traditional send-off and point out the obvious to you, about the education we have attempted to give you in this school, and with it a challenge for the rest of your life.

Oak Grove began with just three students in Krishnamurti’s home in the east end of the Ojai Valley. It was rather a modest beginning for a school that had anything but a modest intent, and at that time we hardly dreamed that it would blossom to what it is today; this stunning campus with so many fine young people graduating every year.

In the foyer of the Main House of Oak Grove School is a picture of Krishnamurti, its founder, who wrote for us twenty-nine years ago that this school is a place where “…one learns both the importance of knowledge and its irrelevance. It is a place where one learns to observe the world without a particular point of view or conclusion. Living in psychological revolution without fragmentation, means living a religious life.” 

That intent has been fervently at the heart of the school from its earliest days but it has not been fulfilled. I don’t mean to be unkind or critical in saying the intent is unfulfilled, so I am just pointing out that it is not easy to live intelligently, with sensitivity, awareness, and thinking for ourselves, all the qualities of a religious life.

You have now, upon leaving, the opportunity to test what you have learned here. Have you learned the importance of knowledge, found its right place. Have you found where knowledge is irrelevant? Perhaps now, as you leave Oak Grove, some of what the school exposed you to will become relevant as you, without the refuge of the place and your parents, as alone you face social injustice, prejudice, conflict, dishonesty, and yourself—yes, you have to face yourself, as a free thinking adult.

My own generation has not been particularly good about making this a sane and safe society, one with social justice, peace on earth, and intelligent governance. My generation has over the past fifty years fought several wars locally, and worldwide and returned to this land and practiced the very primitive and atavistic social evils it alleged to stamp out abroad professing to bring democracy, peace, and high moral value to others. You hardly need the school to make that apparent to you, but what will you do about what you see, or will your action be primarily intellectual?

In this world around us, my generation expects you to take up life as it is, to abide by the laws of the past, to abide by the customs of the mindless generations that have kept us in conflict, kept us cheating in our relationships and business, kept us struggling to achieve by wildly competing. My generation of adults would have you function as cloned drones, soldiering, and breeding, voting, consuming, and thinking like the masses of people whose identity has been handed to them from the past, an immature image of self, a contradiction of humanity. But I venture to say you will be different in your new-found adulthood by virtue of what your education has given to you.

Research has shown that there is a direct and significant relationship between the goals of education in a school and what adults grow up to value. There is a direct relationship between how you lead your life as an adult and what the school you went to wanted you to value, and it comes down to conditioning.

We say here that Oak Grove School doesn’t condition students, but that is a rather blatantly false claim. Qualified, we may say we don’t condition with traditional religious, political, and racial prejudice, dogma, and commonly held social values. True enough. The kind of identity all of that produces is actually useless to you if you can think for yourself. If you can question the authority of organized religions, cleaver psychological gurus, and cultural icons that would have you value what the mass media and pop culture value, then your identity has a deeply religious and intelligent basis.

But Oak Grove does condition with values imparted in the learning atmosphere of the school, with the philosophy of education implicit in the curriculum, with the way your teachers have exposed the world to you. This has provided you with daily acceptances out of which comes the sense of self, of one’s place in the world, of a recognized identity. And in your case a very peculiar identity, as consciously conditioned to be considerate, to question intelligently, to listen, to respect others, to collaborate, to value learning, to recognize and eschew behavior that prevents affection and good relations with others. In a word, to lead a religious life.

The intent and the philosophy of the school thus are more important than perhaps any other dimension of the school. I liken these to the middle ear in your head, an aural organ that is the seat of balance by which you find your upright. I don’t know where the upright, true and balanced life is to be found out there, but I venture to say you have been conditioned by Oak Grove School to find it. The school has not given it to you but it has made you sensitive to finding the true, the valuable. Your inner ear is just that: yours and in you to be used to find out your upright.

Krishnamurti said the school should last five hundred years.  When you think of what has lasted hundreds of years, what has endured through the many fast moving streams of humanity, there is very little. Perhaps a few old buildings: cathedrals, leaning towers, stone walls. The Met in New York City is full of things that have lasted long and reflects cultures that had high art forms and great rituals. But what lasts long, really long in a meaningful sense? What survives? 

In real terms little of Oak Grove can last five hundred years except for the legacy of the living intent of the school—that means you.

Nalanda, a glorious university in ancient India, lasted from the 5^th to the 12^th century. What sustained it seven hundred years was not the architecture, academics, or even its traditions. Rather, the religious quality of high standards in all activities gave the university a world-wide reputation.

The religious intent that Krishnamurti talked about was at the heart of Oak Grove School when it was founded. He said the religious intent is not something you build, or gain, or grow, after trial and error—rather it must be there at the very beginning. Every activity is a religious activity—washing dishes, reading a book, planting a tree, taking a test. Everything was done in a religious way—that is, with full attention and awareness.

You, like previous graduating classes, have had the privilege of being educated in a special school. With that privilege has come an implied expectation that you will be different in your new-found adulthood. In Oak Grove you have had a chance to learn how we are manipulated by the forces of culture. You have had a chance to breathe in the air of the unpolluted atmosphere that is doubt, that is questioning, which is allowing intelligence to blossom. But these are things easily forgotten, very easily forgotten as you grow older, as you become successful, as you are recognized by others.

I challenge you to fulfill the intent of your education here.

I challenge you not to forget your religious culture of learning, being sensitive, being curious, using all your energy whatever you do.

I challenge you to think for yourself, to be new all the time, question the pap that culture feeds you and be in revolt the rest of your lives. Now when you hear it said “live the life of a revolutionary,” you understand it means not to burn, overturn, destroy, or tear down, but rather to live life happily, thinking for yourself, inwardly questioning, and being powerfully humble.

Don’t walk out of this school into the past. Congratulations on your graduation, you are free to walk alive into the present.

Thank you.

©2004 Krishnamurti Foundation of America