You’re Not Special

Tipped off by WBUR this morning, I present the commencement speech given by David McCullough Jr. (Son of the famous historian) at Wellesley High School, where he is a well loved English teacher.

The media has been calling this the ‘You’re Not Special’ speech, because this phrase is repeated a number of times.  I think there are too many negative connotations in summarizing the speech into those three words.  And it misses the context and the meaning put into those three words.  I think this is a great speech, and a healthy counterweight measure to the prevailing trends in putting every child onto a pedestal, a trend that has gone so far as to put every one of them at the same elevation, while falsely promising that they are better than the rest.

Mirrored from The Black Horse of the Blog World.