As 670 Penn GSE graduates prepared to walk across the stage and receive their diplomas Saturday, May 16, Dean Katharine Strunk and Commencement speaker Denise Forte, president and CEO of EdTrust, had one final lesson to impart to them: the work they are preparing to embark on is critical to restoring public trust in education and strengthening democracy.
Dean Strunk opened the morning’s remarks commenting on the importance of the habit of thought graduate studies develop in students: “to turn certainty into inquiry. To hold a question up to the light, turn it over, and look for the seams, cracks, and inconsistencies. To not accept conventional wisdom on its face, but to treat every idea as unsettled, something to be reckoned with.”
This practice, she said, is how truth is slowly and painstakingly revealed and “one of the most important civic disciplines a democracy can ask of its people.” It is work that depends on the public’s trust in education, she added, which has been falling in recent decades. To tackle this challenge, she charged the graduates with carrying the habit of thought they developed at Penn GSE with them into their future practice and the institutions they shape, helping rebuild public trust with “honest accounting, visible correction, and the discipline of telling the truth about hard things.”
“Restoring trust in education requires the willingness to set aside our own certainty, our own egos, and our own assumptions long enough to ask important questions: What do the people we serve actually need from us? What have we missed? Where have we fallen short?” she said. “Those are not comfortable questions. But they are the questions this moment is asking of us.”
“Democracies are strengthened,” she added, “when the institutions within them can tell the truth about themselves, correct course, and keep faith with the people they serve.”
Denise Forte, this year’s Commencement speaker, elaborated on the theme of education’s role in sustaining a thriving democracy. In particular, she emphasized the importance of literacy in developing an informed citizenry and empowering voters.
“Reading is far more than any of its parts: It is more than decoding. It is more than comprehension. I am here to tell you that it is a civil right,” Forte said. “It is a bedrock right—one from which every other right we enjoy flourishes.”
She described how bad actors have used the literacy crisis to their advantage, disenfranchising voters with confusing and misleading voter registration rules, voting directions, and referendum questions. “This is active disenfranchisement designed to make voting a purview of the privileged few. And framing it as anything else, is nothing less than democratic malpractice.”
The path Penn GSE’s graduates have chosen to pursue, Forte added, will “protect democracy and defend the American people from tyranny, oligarchy, and nihilism.”
“It is our job to teach the power of literacy. It is our job to teach the skills to distinguish fact from fiction, to engage in honest debate, and to avoid the traps of conspiracy, hate, and demagoguery,” she said. “Democracy is nothing without literacy.”
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