“For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.”

– Astronaut Donald Williams

All innovation is impossible, and often heretical, before it becomes inevitable and commonplace. Experience of example is often our most transformative teacher as direct experience reaches out to dissolve intellectual preconceptions and plants something far fuller and more profound. Though perhaps analytically speaking nothing new is added to our knowledge, our knowing is now undeniably visceral, emotive, even existential, and rapidly our thoughts reform around this new foundation.

“When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change… it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man.”

– Astronaut Russell “Rusty” Schweikart.

It is almost equally ineffable, this “sense of possibility” which seems to be at the very heart of our movement. Divorced from experience it rapidly becomes an empty symbol, another strategic chess piece to be incorporated in our administrations and communiqués. Yet born of experience it is a powerful guide for the movement, leading the inquiry between awareness of the deep injustice we are called to address and the profound solutions which must inform our actions.

Ten days ago I stood in a room with eleven thousand others deeply engaged in a bold and ambitious struggle over what they see as the civil rights issue of our generation- a real, profound and systemic education revolution towards access, equity and opportunity for all. On stage were leaders who had broken through and created a small part of the world where poverty wasn’t destiny; it was a classroom, or a school, or even part of a system, where the fact your parents were poor, or uneducated, or missing, this fact didn’t decide whether you would love to learn, whether you would dream of futures to be realised, whether you would go to college and access economic, political and cultural influence in shaping your life and your society.

In this room of eleven thousand core members, alumni and partners, and while at a charter school at southernmost limits of Baltimore, and in conversation with a truly impassioned Associate working with children in the slums of Mumbai, and before many of the rousing and informative speeches and reflections and performances that you can see for yourself online, in these and a thousand other moments a sense of possibility arose in my view. A sense that there is an answer to the most intractable problem in our society and that we, individually and collectively, are critical to providing it.

But we don’t need to believe anything. We don’t need to believe that the classrooms with or without charts on the walls, or uniforms, or cheers, or with or without signs on the doors that say Oxford or Yale, we don’t to need to believe that they are better.  We don’t need to believe that schools systems that reward teacher performance with pay or with tenure are better, or that those who publicise or privilege test results are better. We don’t need to believe in a program or a movement, a pedagogy or a practice… We just need to look at the impact, the outcomes, look at what it does to address an injustice for which we would be right to be outraged.

We need to peer beyond the layer of noise, beyond the obligatory response of denial or delay or distraction and inquire into the very facts. Because there are some amazing things in the world out there. It is too different, too beautiful and too cruel to be all the same. Somewhere there are pearls of wisdom, somewhere there are moments of genius. One corner contains a piece of this precious puzzle, in an unlikely neighbourhood another. They are out there and they are being put together right now. How many exist, even within this room, and how many will be created within the classrooms of our Associates or their students?

“Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand”.

-Astronaut Neil Armstrong

Reflections on Teach For America’s 20th Anniversary Summit. View more summit session videos at vimeo.com/​tfa20years.

The twenty-four hour “overseas” journey is the modern hardship of middle-class Australia. We, who have grown soft in our prosperous cities by the seaboard, know little of the difficulties from which famed characteristics of earlier generations grew and that those living in “the other” Australia, of remote and very rural communities, still live with. We are neither so hardy nor so self-reliant, but we have at least a shadow of those great men and women whose nation we now claim. We can drink admirably and often, we can watch a good five full days of cricket without issue, we can shrug off diseases that a European  would take ill from, and make home improvements with a measure of duck tape and WD-40 which would surely cause an American to  seek professional help. We can also walk off a twelve-hour flight and straight onto another just the same without a second thought. This is one of the last remnants of our island heritage.

It is on the second such leg that I now find myself, feeling the strength of my people. It will be my first return to Europe since I left last June, bringing a three and a half years stint in Amsterdam to a close, and ending seven years off island. In the three short weeks on Continent, I shall be visiting fine cities- London, Bucharest, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Amsterdam- and a finer group of old friends. I will witness weddings and children, career changes and life choices, all of which mark these rare individual who I’m at most privilege to name as friends. I will pull into my organisation’s offices in Berlin and London for a weeks work that I look on with the same eyes as I see my friends, engaging emerging leaders in their fields whose personal and professional passions are delightfully and often necessarily interlinked.

My main ambition is to share authentic experience with these people and places and to make good proof against “the tyranny of distance” that claims so much as the years fall away.  As for places, none of the great cities mentioned gives me a moments pause but fairest Amsterdam. Oh, to imagine walking down the glorious canals, which was my sport, my hobby and my muse over thousands of hours, of afternoons and evenings, as the seasons rolled all around, and within, my self. I imagine strolling thus whilst thinking of a younger Arthur canal-side, and that Arthur envisioning the older in turn reflecting upon the former. Across this veil of time I sense communion in this serene aesthetic of Amsterdam.

The last six months is the longest duration I’ve spent in one country since 2001 and has passed with the speed of a new role in a known land. This trip will be a chance to break from that engagement, to take an account of that which I’ve not allowed myself in my months returned home.  I will pursue a closer examination of the journey that I’ve undertaken in the years since I left, to take some better measure of who now lies behind these eyes, of who it is that returns, of what has been gained and lost, and what quiet space remains ever present.

It wasn’t so much the conversation, although it was as far reaching and honest a trialogue as any, as it was the meeting of the three of us upon this rare mountain lake, at a tipping point in each of our individual journeys. We were young and powerful with much to be proud of, yet humbled by this place, by each other’s presence, and the most distinct feeling that whatever unfolded from this moment would be marked with the challenge and call that names history.

The image of those mountains towering above the water in the distance, the confidence and trust we shared, the laughter, insight and ability; these will be defining pieces of my youth. In our best of times, we may look back on them lightly, but in the cyclical moments of darkness I do not underrate how important such experiences were in helping me find the light.

Tom continued his career at the cutting edge of designing learning environments through ever larger enterprises and now has taken the entrepreneurial leap. He has also launched a phenomenal blog that puts my Codex to shame. Brodie went on to lead our organisation, join a strategy consultancy and soon enough will take an academic turn, in the whichever premier graduate institution is lucky enough to earn him. He, of course, uses his blog Kyosaku to help us realise and release.

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.” 1

Three years and four months ago David Foster Wallace, one of the most important American authors of the last twenty years, stepped aside from his writing sabbatical to share reflections on the “capital-T” truths for living. A rare, intellectual and enquiring perspective “it was Wallace’s odd sense of double vision that most defined his sensibility. He was a humanist who could not help but see both sides of the story, who imagined himself into the gray middle areas of his writing.” 2

Ten days ago, this man who seemed so uncomfortable being cast as the troubled genius, lost touch with one side of the story, and hung himself. He had suffered from depression throughout his life and it had intensified deeply in recent months. In this light, the commencement address is even more honest, beautiful and true. It seems not so much spoken for the graduands, as it is a final attempt for this rational mind to teach his emotional self a lesson it refused to hear.

In a quiet time read the whole thing, or if it is you are so inclined, speak it out and be a vehicle for these words who have lost their source. Maybe we can hear the voice that he could not.

A wonderful interview below, featuring Wallace on the Charlie Rose show in 1997, soon after he had been awarded the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.

1: Keyton Commencement Address, 2005.
2: David Foster Wallace: Idealist Skeptic, LA Times

A vague awareness of sweat soaked fabric wrapping my body drifts into view. It must be sometime in the afternoon by now. I’m in Trancoso- no.. now it’s Arrial D’Ajuda. My body craves water. It must be three already. What time did we finish? Flashes of the hour long morning walk back along the beaches roll past, we arrived just in time for breakfast. Ah breakfast, hence the corn flakes I feel among the bedsheets. A momentary reflection upon my terribleness and then.. it was a wonderful party. A hundred people along the beach, with a huge moon filling the sky and the sea, the air thick with music, laughter and a sub-tropical humidity. I might just be able to open my eyes. Then shower. It would bring sweet relief from all this sweaty fabric. And thank God for this ceiling fan. The symphony of it’s ticking and whiring emerges, rhythms ever changing. Kept the mosquitos away too. Mosquitos! Tens of bites, old and new, compete for my attention. Itch. Itch. I roll onto my side, forget again and find relief. To do? What to do? To stay again or continue the northward journey? Days are slipping so quickly, they feel almost stolen. It’s already the full moon. Ah, the full moon. Maybe I should go back to Trancoso, for a celebration? Who told me? Which of these casual acquaintances upon the road was it? Too many voices, but I’m fairly sure. Hmm Trancoso again. Different to this place. Arrial is such a tourist village- even one day here is enough to read that. Big with the Israelis, menu’s in Hebrew! A smile. Then memories of a less than pleasant run in with some impolite Israelis guys flashes into view. Probably just out the freaking army. Poor bastards… The quiet of Trancoso takes over again, the sound of a silient summer night, high above the beach. An hour away and who knows if anyone is still there? A million other doubts arise. Then a stronger voice, Eleven Days Arthur. Eleven. I should go.

“This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief. But there’s a difference with this dream. Everything cruel and unconscious done in the illusion of the present world, all that does not fade away at the death-waking. It stays, and it must be interpreted…

And this groggy time we live, this is what it’s like: A man goes to sleep in the town where he has always lived, and he dreams he’s living in another town. In the dream, he doesn’t remember the town he’s sleeping in his bed in. He believes the reality of the dream town. The world is that kind of sleep.

The dust of many crumbled cities settles over us like a forgetful doze, but we are older than those cities. We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again.

That’s how a young person turns toward a teacher. That’s how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively. Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.”

Rumi (مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی)

Artwork; Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above a sea of fog

“Keep the glass topped up, it’s not over just yet
Pull off the social bluff, celebrate your success
Turn the sunlight out, find a place in the shade
If you measure the world by the mark that you make.”

- The Metre, Powderfinger

Read/Listen to the full piece…