Dear Graduating Sixth Graders

Author’s note: I’m in the middle of transferring some of my older writing from an archive over to Medium. The following is a speech that I gave to my 100 sixth-grade public school students at the end of a year-long class on critical thinking, collaboration, and project-based learning.

Ladies and gentlemen:

We’ve finally arrived — the end of your one and only sixth grade year, the end of my first year of teaching, and the next-to-last day that we have together. A few of you, I will be seeing over the summer and again next year when school starts back. But for many of you — perhaps most — this is the last chance I’ll ever have to really sit down with you and share my thoughts. Some of you — as we all know — are not interested in those thoughts, and so I’d like to take this moment to invite those people to leave. Not with anger, not with a consequence, but just because, in this last lecture, I’d rather only speak to those who really want to listen. So, leave if you’d like — leave in the middle, if I’m boring you — but bear this in mind — once you’ve left, you cannot come back and listen halfway.

As something of an unusual teacher, I’ve tried to give you things that go beyond formulas and chapter summaries, current events and lab reports. Those things are important — indeed, that content and those skills are the real reason you are here, and I don’t mean to sound like they aren’t worth learning.

But since you already had four excellent teachers covering the nuts-and-bolts of a sixth grade education, I tried to stretch a little, and touch on some ideas that most grownups don’t bother to talk about. Whether I succeeded or not is really up to you to decide, but I want to give it one last shot before you go.

One hundred years ago — at the beginning of the modern age — none of you would have ever ridden in a car or eaten from a refrigerator. Most of you would have expected to live to about the age of 60, although almost all of you would have lost a brother, sister, or friend to tuberculosis or influenza or smallpox, and certainly at least one of us who’s here in the room today wouldn’t be here alive. Probably none of you would have been headed to college, and you would instead have looked forward to an average salary of around $750 a year — that’s $16,000 in today’s money — in jobs like textiles, farming, mining, or manufacturing.

One thousand years ago — near the end of the middle ages — perhaps half of you wouldn’t have survived this long. None of those remaining would be able to read, most of you would have a single set of clothes, and each of you would go to sleep at night in a hut made of earth or rough wood that you shared with your whole extended family, after a long day of unpaid labor in fields whose food you weren’t allowed to eat. Odds are, you would never even have seen a coin made of gold or silver, only copper and tin pennies.

And ten thousand years ago — at the beginning of human history — even the hut would have been iffy. You would have been born into a world without medicine, without science, and with only the barest beginnings of government, a dangerous place where your intelligence was your only ally against the strength and fury of all nature.

Clearly, as time has gone on, life has grown better for us. There has never been an easier time to live in, at least for those of us lucky enough to be born into modernized, democratic nations. Even the poorest people in America can find a roof and read or write a word or two. Few of you have ever gone a whole day without food, most of you have never had an illness that threatened to take your life, and even those of you who have received quick and professional care that had you back up and running. There is a society around you that teaches you, cares for you, encourages you to speak your mind and offers you a thousand chances to choose your own path. There is a world outside that is closer than ever before, with technology to let you speak to friends on the other side of the world in an instant, and visit them in person in just a few hours. We can go to space, or to the mountains, or to the bottom of the ocean — many of you in just ten or eleven or twelve years have seen a hundred times more than most human beings in history saw in their entire lives. It’s a magnificent time to be alive.

It is not, however, a magnificent time to be a kid.

Think about this — ten thousand years ago, each and every one of you would have known how to track and to hunt, to make tools from trees and rocks and bones, to build a fire from scratch, to survive winter outdoors, and to find your way through even the thickest woods. You would have been treated as an adult, and expected to act like one—in some parts of the world, this is still the case, for people your age.

A thousand years ago, each of you would already be well on your way to expertise in the trade or profession of your life. Some of you would already be able to run an entire farm, or to hammer out a suit of armor, or to spin, weave, and sew a dress. If you were among the rich and noble, you would be able to wield an axe, sword, or bow, to dance in a dozen styles and recite poetry in two or three languages, and to command a household full of servants and armsmen.

Even just a hundred years ago, many of the girls in this room would be preparing for marriage in a year or two, and motherhood a few years after that; most of the boys would already be working to bring home money, and would be entirely self-sufficient before long.

There are significant problems with many of these historical situations, to be sure. But the thing I’m pointing at is personhood. Agency. Being taken seriously by the culture around you. Here you sit before me, with curfews and bedtimes, with limits on the things you watch and the places you go, with rules against fighting and shouting and running and a society that does not trust you to be anything other than a child.

How does that make you feel?

I ask you — are you any less capable than the eleven- and twelve-year-olds of a hundred years ago? Any less intelligent than people your age in the middle ages? Any less healthy or strong than your paleolithic predecessors? Why is it that, as it has grown easier and easier to be alive, society has asked less and less of you?

In part, it’s because it’s human nature to work as little as possible. Who wants to sweat and groan when they don’t have to? Ancient people worked harder, matured more quickly, because they had to — back then, if kids didn’t grow up quickly, they didn’t grow up at all. These days, since life is easier, we don’t demand as much from our children — we don’t ask you to bring home the food, or work in the coal mines, or marry at age twelve so you can bear enough babies for the family to survive.

But ask yourselves this — does the fact that you don’t need to struggle so hard mean you shouldn’t struggle at all?

I look around this room, and I see an amazing amount of potential. There are twenty of you in this class. Twenty. That means that, just in this room alone, I could have a Shakespeare, a Caesar, a Joan of Arc … a Queen Elizabeth and a Marie Curie … an Alexander, a Lincoln, a Columbus … an Amelia Earhart, a Beethoven, an Emily Dickinson … Galileo, Cleopatra, and Jane Austen … Robin Hood, Aristotle, Eleanor Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, Florence Nightingale, and Jesus Christ. Multiply that by five for your entire grade.

Yet here you sit — many of you — just coasting. Relaxing. Doing enough to get by. You do your work, you get your A’s and B’s, and you go home to play sports or video games … to read books and watch TV. You wait, and wait, not even thinking about what to do with your lives, because you’ve always been told that they don’t really start until you’re grown up.

That can be true, if you want it to be. Our society wants you to fall for it. The adult world doesn’t trust you, so they’ve taught you not to trust yourself. The adult world doesn’t think you’re ready for responsibility, so they’ve given you as little of it as possible. The adult world wants to protect you, to keep you happy and safe, so they’ve built you an armored bubble in which you don’t need to use your muscles. The adult world wants you to think that being a child is somehow different from being a real person, and they’ve drilled it into you your entire lives. Haven’t you said it to me yourselves? Gosh, Mr. Sabien, can’t you just treat us like kids for once!?

But I’ve been where you are, and I’m here now, and I’m telling you … there’s no magical moment where everything changes. This is your life, it’s already begun, and the hours and days you have right now are worth just as much as the hours and days you’ll have once you turn eighteen. You’ve been told all your life about your amazing potential, how one day you’ll grow up to be presidents and athletes and movie stars. But how many grownups have ever expected you to blow them away right now?

In the end, it’s all a matter of how seriously you take yourself. Like it or not, in some ways, you are stuck as a kid. Your parents aren’t going to just let you start staying up all the time and going wherever you like … your teachers aren’t suddenly going to let you out of school. There are rules, and laws, and systems that aren’t going to change any time soon.

But you can refuse to stop there. You can stand up and make something of it, of the rest of your life, the afternoons and weekends and holidays and summers. You can set yourself a greater challenge, push yourself where no one else will, and become something that no one expects — and you can do it today. They treat you like a child, but you don’t have to act like one. You don’t have to be one — especially not with the tools of the modern world at your disposal. You can make the choice — am I a child, or am I a fully real person, with real thoughts, real feelings, real ideas, and real power?

It’s a decision made in moments, in a thousand choices scattered throughout the day.

When my friends act stupid, will I join them?

When my parents put their trust in me, will I live up to it?

When I give my word, will I keep it?

When I’ve started down a path, will I finish it?

When I’ve got nothing to do, will I do something anyway? Or will I turn to video games? Texting? Killing time? Laughing and making fun of others, because I haven’t got the guts to take a chance and try something risky myself?

When I’m faced with a choice between what is right, and what is easy, which one will I take?

Kids your age have saved lives, and they’ve taken them. They’ve done drugs, and they’ve said no to drugs. They’ve stolen things and gotten away with it, and they’ve dedicated their lives to charities and given to those in need. I have seen eleven-year-olds who’ve written novels, raised siblings, crashed cars, rescued eagles, built airplanes, cussed out grownups, been on TV, jumped off buildings, run away from home, climbed mountains, and looked the President in the eye.

But I’ve also seen eleven-year-olds who have never … done … anything. Whose greatest accomplishments consist of high scores and popularity contests and who, if you ask them what they’re going to be when they grow up, just shrug and say “I don’t know, I’ve never even thought about it.” Eleven year olds who will never make a mark on the world, and who, when they die eighty or ninety years from now, will not be remembered.

There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with just—living a good and happy life. You don’t have to live up to some standard of heroism or importance or what-have-you, if what you truly want is to simply enjoy life. Life is good, and there’s no shame in taking advantage of that.

But for those of you who want more than that—for those of you who want to rise to some particular challenge, who might one day grow up to be the next astronaut, the next novelist, the next general, the next surgeon, the next filmmaker, the next Olympic medalist, the next inventor…

Start now.

If you wait for the grownups to tell you what to do, you’ll never be greater than they are, because you’ll have wasted your first eighteen years doing nothing. Ten thousand years ago, eleven-year-olds had no language and no houses, but they battled tigers and rode out hurricanes. One thousand years ago, eleven-year-olds had no hospitals and no education, but they fought in wars and helped build cities. A hundred years ago, eleven-year-olds had no rights and no technology, but they worked adult jobs and they took care of themselves. Today, you have all of those things and more, every advantage the world can give you.

What are you going to do with it?