The Senior Anthem

 

 

 

Each year KA holds a "Declamation Contest" in which every student in the school must declaim in front of both his English and his Arabic class. Each student must practice public speaking! In 9th and 10th grades you do not write your own speeches but rather you look for a previously written great speech in Arabic and in English and then you orate. However, the juniors and seniors must write their own speech and deliver it front of the class. Each class then selects a winner; then the entire grade hears each class's winner. Once you win your grade you go on to the final round and the final four in English, and the final four in Arabic, and present to the entire school. Then a panel of judges selects the winner for the school.

Recently Talal Toukan, a student of mine in Art History, and an actor in my plays, and all-around stupendous young man, won the Declamation Contest for the school. He based his talk on a painting we had studied in class, but more importantly, he put his own spin on this painting and what it should mean to his peers. I asked Talal if he minded if I had a copy of his speech and posted it on my blog. Give this a read and see if you don't feel better about the future of the world in the hands of some of our youth!

 

 

 

I saw a painting recently called Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer. It is by a man called Rembrandt. In it a bearded Aristotle grasps a marble bust of Homer, thinking, while a gold chain clings to his upper body. On this chain hangs a medallion of his student Alexander the Great. He is dressed in 17^th century attire, with long hanging sleeves and a big circular hat characteristic of the artist's era. Although he is surrounded by darkness, which fills up most of the canvas, his face is covered by light from an unseen window to the upper left. As for the subject matter, Aristotle is thinking of what the future has to hold for him. Will he be like the person whose bust he holds, a poet and artist. Or will he be like the person whose medallion he wears, a ruthless but great leader.

In 1961 the painting sold for $2.3 million dollars. To me it's priceless and the reason for that is simple. It's because it's is a portrait of me. When I look at it, it makes me Aristotle. He may look older in the painting but Aristotle is a senior, and I'm sure of it. He has just completed his college applications and started his second term. Besides his fatal case of senoritis, he has been confronted with a question we all faced this year: What defines me?

Aristotle is thinking about how some of us as seniors have tried to answer it simply. "We are older therefore we get to be in charge. We get to be destructive, who cares we'll be gone next year anyway. We get to laze around and forget about our grades and forget about our lives because we've been thinking about them for so long."

But I think Aristotle would beg to differ. He would say that, yes, we do get to forget about our grades, but not for our own comfort. We get to forget about our grades because we realize that the numbers that we thought defined us no longer apply. A 94 percent or a B- doesn't mean anything to us anymore. Instead we have to choose how to judge our success. We have to remember life because we neglected it on all those nights when we we're up until two o'clock in the morning working on an essay or a lab report thinking solely of our GPAs.

So let's remember life like Aristotle does. Does it make sense to define ourselves by what universities we got in to? I don’t think so. I think this admissions process only blinds us. You should be the one who chooses what university you get into, not vice-versa. Regardless of how difficult it is to answer the question "Who am I?" you should be the one to answer it, not a room full of people looking at your SAT scores. We're artworks not statistics.

So who do you want to be? Rembrandt's Aristotle was faced with the choice of becoming an isolated artist or a great world leader. Should we seek fame, fortune or, knowledge. Pleasure or depth. Mind or matter.

Well it's really up to each of us to answer that question individually. For now all I know is that we need to return what we took, what we took for granted: King's.

Let's go back to the painting for a second. Aristotle was an ingenious Ancient Greek philosopher as I'm sure a lot of you know. However, we only know as much as we know about him because of Islamic scholars. It was Al-Kindi, Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina among others who originally translated the philosopher's ancient Greek works into Arabic which were then translated into Latin just in time to fuel a Renaissance in Florence. But don't worry I'm not going to follow in the footsteps of speakers we've heard before. I'm not going to reminisce over times when Arabs ruled the world. And I'm certainly not going to tell you off for all the misery Arabs have gone through since our glory days. We're only teenagers after all.

All we know is that Arabs haven't been doing really well lately, and we shouldn't be ashamed of that. Every people have their ups and downs, and now we're down. I would even take it to the extent of saying that we're going through a Medieval Age. Religious extremism and dictatorships have eaten us from the inside out. Our culture is a broken mirror lying on the floor. You pick up a piece and only see a fragment of your identity.

But I'm not upset about that. In fact, if I were thinking selfishly I would be happy about it. I mean, look at us; we're the thinkers, the exceptions. And the great thing about exceptions is that they break the rules. We get to break the misconceptions and spread our progressive mentality.

And I love King's Academy for that. King's is my intellectual sanctuary. It's a breeding ground for ideas. It's a place where you can talk about whatever you want. You don't think God exists, ok then let's discuss it. You think homosexuality's a sin, we'll I'm sure that can be debated. And my respect for King's doesn't stop there. You want to know what I really think? I think King's could possibly give birth to another Arab golden age.

But some of you dislike King's and you dislike me for talking about it in such a grand way so let me share my crazy vision of the Middle East with you. In the future, King's continues to produce excellent students who go abroad to study. After several years those students come back and start donating to King's. Some of them might even open up schools that match King's. Those schools then begin to compete to see who has the best writers, the best mathematicians, the best poets, the best soccer players. And it isn't even about which one sends off more students to Harvard. It's about which school enriches their students' minds more. Anyway, that wave of students goes to study abroad, and possibly at regional universities King's alumni opened, and they too come back. Then they become professional mathematicians, artists, poets, etc. and they begin to compete to see who can produce the most intellectually stimulating material. And there you have it another Arab golden age.

But that's ridiculous isn't it? What about all the problems? What about the economy? What about the politics? Who in their right minds would come back to this wasteland of a country? Who would donate to King's after the years of torture it put us through?

We'll be graduating soon seniors. And as we near the end of the year they'll be putting together a senior video and they'll come up to each of us and ask: "Where will you be ten years from now?" So let me tell you where you'll be and save you some time. You'll be in your office on top of a skyscraper named after your billion dollar company. You'll be in New York at the United Nations prosecuting an international criminal in front of hundreds of people. Or you'll be in London acting in a play that is sold out five days a week, forty weeks a year.

But just know that, whether your secretary leaves your room for a second to grab the latest market predictions, or whether you're driving home from the UN with less hope for the world in your heart than you had the day before, or the curtains close after your big monologue and the applause dies down, you're going to be alone. And for a brief moment you won't have anything to think about. So naturally, your brain will pull out a file you stowed away from the past, a question you haven't thought of since you're senior year: What defines me? Am I Alexander or Homer? You're neither; you're Aristotle again, thinking. But the question reminds you of how you shared the problem with an entire class. And for a second you remember that beautiful school half-way across the world and you think to yourself: What did I do to contribute to it? How did I help it realize its vision?

 

Wow. Thank you Talal...