Grace Ledbetter:	I'd like to welcome you all to Swarthmore and I'd like to say that from the perspective of a faculty member, one of our greatest pleasures is teaching you. By teaching you I don't mean telling you stuff that we know and you don't, although occasionally that does happen. I mean by teaching you, helping you progress from wherever you are, wherever you start out. Helping each and every one of you to move forward and improve whatever skills, whatever capacities, whatever ways of thinking we focus on in a particular class.
	We don't expect you to start out at any particular level. We don't expect you to start here at this one place. We expect you to start out wherever you are. And we will give you the tools you need to move forward. With this in mind, I'd like to talk about two things today. Transformation and mistakes. But first I'd like to ask you a question. It's a rhetorical question. How many hours over the past year have you spent thinking and talking about where you should go to college? A lot of hours.
	I think it might be fair to say you've spent a staggering number of hours doing that. Okay, so another question. In the past year, how many hours have you spent thinking about what a good college education is? About exactly what you ant to get out of college? I'm guessing not as many hours. Maybe not even an hour. The good news is that you've been admitted to Swarthmore so you don't need to think too much more about where you're going to go to college but it is time to start thinking about what a good college education is and what you want to get out of college.
	A philosopher you may have heard of, Plato, who's works I teach every year radically redefined what a good education is and I believe that what he says is truly valuable for us today. The common view of education in his day was that you went to an expert who had knowledge that you did not have and you learned the things that the expert knew. You increased your store of knowledge. Now, increasing your store of knowledge is no doubt a part of education, but Plato did not think that it got at everything that was important about education or even the most important thing about true education. He therefore proposed that true education transforms the entire person. Not just what she knows, but how she thinks, how she lives, what her values are, how she spends her time, where she lives, how she treats people, how she conducts herself with others.
	In Plato's view, when a person has been truly educated, she sees everything differently. You see, the danger for Plato is that we don't learn as much as we might because we are not open enough to questioning ourselves. Our own views. We're not open enough to admitting the ways in which we might be wrong.
	When I was an undergraduate at a nearby women's college that you may have heard of, I was what you might call very bad at taking criticism. I was terrified at reading the comments on my papers because I thought they might say something negative. I really just wanted to focus on the compliments. I wanted to hear "This is a great paper and here's why." When I did read the criticisms, I was outraged. The criticism was unfair. It was ridiculous. Criticisms of my work were these annoying things I just had to learn to endure. I gradually became better at taking in criticism but I only truly transformed my attitude much later in life and from a very specific experience.
	I was observing a ballet class that my daughter was taking. She was very young at the time but here were also a lot of teenage girls in the class who had studied for a long time and were excellent dancers. The teacher focused on them and for the entire hour and a half, seemed to do nothing but scrutinize their dancing and tell them what they were doing wrong. Honestly I expect these girls to break down into tears at any moment because I would have, but they didn't. I was so full of admiration for them because I knew that I would not have reacted the way they did. Not only did they not break down into tears, but they seemed to become inspired by the criticisms and that is because they were given many chances to try again and to improve what they were doing.
	At first, I thought this must have been a terrible class for them, but then I realized it was great class. It was a great class because they were given the careful attention of a teacher who pinpointed their shortcomings, helped them to improve and gave them chances to improve. They did improve and so it was good class. Later in the class, the dancers went one by one across the floor in a difficult jumping sequence and as each one went alone, the whole rest of the class and all of the observers watched them. When it was my daughter's turn, I was a little nervous, but there she went running across the floor, flying beautifully into the air and then smack. She fell flat on the floor. I thought "oh no. This is terrible, she's gonna be humiliated. She's going to cry." But she didn't. She got up and she laughed it off.
	I was shocked. She started laughing at herself. I don't know where she got a healthy attitude like that because it was not from me. My point in this extended ballet analogy is that criticisms of your work and mistakes are not an unfortunate part of education. That you must learn to endure. They are rather absolutely key to becoming educated and to making progress. The better you can be at taking in all feedback from your professors and working to improve yourself, the less afraid you are of hearing about where you need to improve, the more you will be transformed by your college education.
	I'd now like to talk about yet another paradoxical feature of education. You may have read Plato's allegory of the cave. It's an allegory of education and it's very strange. It says that almost all of us are prisoners chained in a cave and what we take to be the truth, what we see within the cave is not really the truth. We have a distorted view of reality. The truth is the light and the sun outside of the cave. In order to become educated, we must leave the cave and discover the world outside of it. The allegory tells the story of one fortunate person who is gradually let out of the cave by a guide or a teacher and this being led out of the cave, is a metaphor for becoming educated. However, one of the strangest features of this allegory is that the student who is led out of the cave by the teacher resists the entire time. He's angry, he's frustrated, he doesn't not want to go up into the light and he is in a deep state of confusion.
	What do these intense emotions, this turmoil and this resistance have to do with education? What does Plato mean to say about education? That it's a terrible and unpleasant experience? Not exactly. What Plato means to say I think is something that we do not often recognize. Education, true education does not just involve unfortunate moments of confusion and emotional turmoil, it actually requires those things. In order to have a transformative education, you must endure periods of deep confusion. Not just fleeting moments. If you have an easygoing, nothing is too hard path, that's not the path of true education. If you don't experience deep confusion, you're not making as much progress as you could. So if as you go through your studies and your life at Swarthmore, you find yourself feeling deeply frustrated, confused, and possibly angry, that's a good sign.
	That's a good sign and I love it when students come into my office feeling that way. It's a good sign because if at that point you don't give up, but you persist, you will be on your way to transforming your life through education. One fall when I was teaching my ancient philosophy seminar, a student from the seminar came into my office after he had received his first paper back. He was visibly upset. He was a senior and he explained to me that he had never received anything less than an A on a paper and he could not understand why I had given him a B.
	So I explained that there were some excellent things about his paper, but there were other things that he really needed to work on and I explained what those were. Now at this moment, the conversation could have gone many ways. He could have said "Okay, I guess I understand." He could have said "It doesn't seem fair to me that those shortcomings brought me down to a B." He could have said "But I tried so hard." But he dis not say any of those things, and that's why I remember this conversation so well.
	Instead he said "Will you help me to improve the things that I need to improve?" Those are the words that every professor wants to hear. I said "Yes, I will." And I worked with him the entire semester and by the end he was doing absolutely first grade work in the class.
	Decide what kind of student you're going to be. Don't be afraid of admitting that you don't know something or that you might be wrong. What you get out of your college education depends on it. Thank you.