https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m6htCB4rzc
Madam Director General of ORT Uruguay, deans, national officials and representatives of partner institutions, members of our university, and Friends of ORT.
Dear graduates and your families, we are delighted to welcome you on this special day. A college education is a challenge that requires dedication, talent, and resilience. The effort sometimes seems greater than we can handle. There isn’t enough time. At times, personal circumstances weigh us down. The results aren’t always what we expect. These are inevitable experiences in college life and in professional life. They are experiences you cannot avoid, but you can face them and, above all, you can overcome them. All of you who are here today have succeeded; you can be proud.
A college education is one of the most transformative experiences in life. A person enters college as one person and leaves as another. A teenager enters and an adult leaves. A student enters and a professional leaves. Our mission is to guide and support you through this transformative process. We hope we have succeeded. We hope we have been able to support and guide you when you needed it. We hope we have been able to encourage you to excel and to give your best.
Dear families, thank you for supporting your children and grandchildren as they embark on this journey of preparing for the future. We share your pride in the success your children and grandchildren have achieved.
ORT Uruguay will soon celebrate its 75th anniversary. We have changed significantly over the course of our history, but our mission and spirit remain unchanged. Our mission is to contribute to our country’s development through education. We firmly believe that education is the only way for people to lead dignified and independent lives.
ORT is a story of constant renewal. When a group of Uruguayans founded ORT in our country 75 years ago, the last remaining ORT schools in Europe were being closed by the German occupiers and their local collaborators. In just a few months, in 1942–1943, ORT schools that had existed for decades in Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, Vilnius, Kaunas, and many other cities were shut down. Their students, teachers, and principals were deported, most of them never to return. Seventy-five years ago, our Director General was in hiding from those very same people in Lyon. But while ORT was being shut down in some countries, it was being reborn in others, such as Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Mexico.
Today we are proud of what we have accomplished over the past 75 years, but true to the spirit of ORT, we are more concerned with what we will do in the years to come than with what we have achieved so far.
As you know, ORT is a Jewish institution open to everyone. Many cultures and religions have contributed to our civilization. In my opinion, one of Judaism’s most important contributions was the idea—revolutionary for its time—of a society without birth-based hierarchies. In Hellenistic thought, as exemplified by Aristotle, there is the notion that some are born to rule and others to be ruled.
In ancient times, Judaism broke new ground with its vision of a caste-free society. The foundation of this concept was compulsory, dialogical education. In Judaism, school is more important than the synagogue, and educating children is just as important as feeding or clothing them. In Judaism, the essence of learning is not obedience but questioning; the driving force of learning is questions, not answers. As the Talmudic saying goes: “I have learned much wisdom from my teacher, but I learned more from my colleagues and even more from my students.” That is why students respect their teachers when they question their ideas, not when they passively accept them.
Dear graduates, graduation marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. Your journey toward the future begins now. You will all seek success, each with your own definition of it. Do not be afraid of your ambitions. Do not condemn the successes of others if they are achieved in good faith. A society without outstanding individuals cannot progress. But always make sure that your idea of success is genuinely your own. Make sure that you are the true authors of your ambitions. Sometimes, without realizing it, we embody the ambitions of others rather than those that deeply move and inspire us. Understanding what will make us happy in life is one of humanity’s greatest challenges, and each of us must find our own answer.
Seek your path with humility. There should be no vanity in knowledge, nor should there be pride in ignorance. No matter how much you have studied, always remember that you know and understand only a small fraction of reality.
Beware of utopias that promise moral perfection. To promise perfection is to promise nothing, because what is perfect cannot be human, and what is human cannot be perfect. To promise the unachievable is immoral. If promises cannot be fulfilled, they are empty promises; and if they are not fulfilled, they are broken promises.
Seek out purpose in your lives so that they may be fulfilling. Find your own path, but never lose sight of the fact that you are members of a society. To paraphrase Jonathan Sacks, remember that a society is stronger when it supports the weakest, richer when it supports the poorest, and invulnerable when it protects the most vulnerable.
Stand up for your right to form your own opinions. The greatest threat to democracy is not extremists, but those who have no opinions. Without opinions, there is no dialogue; without dialogue, there is no community. Vaclav Havel said that totalitarianism’s greatest triumph is not preventing people from expressing their opinions, but stripping them of their will to form opinions.
Always choose big challenges that push you to grow. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes—there’s no risk without mistakes, and no progress without risk. Be demanding of yourselves, because that’s a prerequisite for being able to demand the same from others.
Reject the “alternative logic” that is poisoning the dialogue in our country as well as in others. A democracy can only thrive if decisions are made based on the truth. “Alternative logic” or “the narrative” is a manipulation designed to present the narrator’s actions as heroic and those of others as diabolical. That is why, in “alternative logic,” the past is not historical but mythological, and why leaders are not people who must be held accountable, but infallible prophets. In “the narrative,” it is inconceivable that the leader could be wrong. If they lie, they are actually speaking a “different truth.” If they embezzle public funds, they were actually seeking social justice. If their policies fail, they were actually “well-intentioned.”
We Uruguayans have allowed “alternative logic” to divide us, pit us against one another, and hold us back for far too long. It is time for change, and you, as the new generation and the most educated members of society, have a special responsibility. Let us demand intellectual honesty from our leaders and begin a dialogue among all Uruguayans.
This year, we can’t help but ask ourselves: What is the meaning of history? In our time, technological progress and moral decline coexist, and that is the challenge facing your generation. The turn of the century filled us with hopes for a better world. We thought that a technologically advanced and globalized world would be a more peaceful one. We thought that if people knew each other better, they would respect one another more and be less hostile toward one another.
Technological progress continues at breakneck speed, yet at the same time, the morality of human behavior seems to be regressing. Who could have imagined the events in Charlottesville? We witnessed parades of Nazi flags in the very country that defeated Nazism, and an apparent reluctance on the part of its top national leaders to condemn them. Who could have imagined Venezuela’s Parliament being replaced by a Council of State, just as happened in our country? We thought that actions like these no longer had a place in Latin America. Who could have imagined that the president of Syria would gas-bomb his own people 100 years after World War I?
Your generation will have to confront this disconnect between technological progress and moral decline. It is inevitable that you will have to do so, because increasingly powerful technologies in the hands of increasingly immoral people lead to dystopian scenarios.
Dear graduates, a new world awaits you—a world where wealth is born of knowledge and creativity. In this new world, you will have to keep pace with the ever-evolving intersection of education and technology; you will have to learn to keep learning.
In this new world, higher education is the new literacy. Higher education is the key to personal progress and to active citizenship. In this new world, the opposite of education is not ignorance; the opposite of education is exclusion. Citizens need education to progress, and society needs educated citizens to thrive.
That is why providing a quality education to all citizens is not merely a matter of public policy; it is a moral imperative. In our country, we have an inclusive discourse but an exclusionary reality. We are trapped in a vicious cycle in which earning a good income depends on obtaining a good education, but obtaining a good education depends on having a good income. The most disadvantaged Uruguayans are trapped in this vicious cycle, generation after generation, and that is the true social debt our country owes.
The lack of inclusivity in Uruguayan education jeopardizes our country’s viability in the knowledge era. A country’s education system is the best indicator of its commitment to progress. We have tried to improve it by investing more money, but that doesn’t work because it isn’t an economic problem. We have tried to improve it by changing the education authorities, but that doesn’t work either because it isn’t a governance issue. We have tried to improve it through political agreements, but that doesn’t work either because educational shortcomings cannot be corrected by law. You cannot decree that a person knows English; you cannot mandate by law that a person knows the Pythagorean Theorem; you cannot expropriate one person’s knowledge and give it to another.
Improving education in Uruguay is not a problem; it is a dilemma. It is a dilemma that stems from two conflicting rights: the right of institutions and corporations to preserve their privileges, and the right of future generations to receive a quality education. It is a moral dilemma, and it can only be resolved when national leaders take on the responsibility of finding a way to honor the past while paving the way for the future.
Uruguay is ideally positioned to thrive in the knowledge society if we resolve this dilemma. We have a social culture, intellectual capital, and a wealth of natural resources that should be ideal for development based on talent and intelligence. It is within our reach to transform ourselves into a country whose production is based on knowledge, technology, and innovation. But to do so, we must adapt to this new world marked by globalization and technological advancement. We must let go of the illusion that the rest of the world will adapt to us.
The public debate over labor reform in Brazil, for example, highlights the strategic confusion we are currently mired in. Labor reform in Brazil is a battle from the last century. That should not be our real concern. Our real concern should be the quality of high school graduates in Finland, the number of PhDs in science and technology in Korea, the pace of entrepreneurship in Israel, and the revaluation of natural resources in New Zealand. Our potential for development as a country cannot depend on the fragmentation of leave policies. Progress in the 21st century is a competition of cognition, not of overtime.
Dear graduates, thank you once again for being here with your families. Thank you for allowing us to learn from you and alongside you. Uruguay is not a large country, but it is a great country, and you have a duty to make it even greater. Uruguay needs you. Succeed from Uruguay and help your country succeed. Find your own path, but know that ORT will always be your home.
Thank you very much.