learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging ones

Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.
- Dana Gioia, Commencement address at Stanford, June 17, 2007

It is a great honor to be asked to give the Commencement address at my
alma mater. Although I have two degrees from Stanford, I still feel a
bit like an interloper on this exquisitely beautiful campus. A person
never really escapes his or her childhood.

At heart I'm still a working-class kid—half Italian, half Mexican—from
L.A., or more precisely from Hawthorne, a city that most of this
audience knows only as the setting of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction
and Jackie Brown—two films that capture the ineffable charm of my
hometown.

Today is Father's Day, so I hope you will indulge me for beginning on
a personal note. I am the first person in my family ever to attend
college, and I owe my education to my father, who sacrificed nearly
everything to give his four children the best education possible.

My dad had a fairly hard life. He never spoke English until he went to
school. He barely survived a plane crash in World War II. He worked
hard, but never had much success, except with his family.

When I was about 12, my dad told me that he hoped I would go to
Stanford, a place I had never heard of. For him, Stanford represented
every success he had missed yet wanted for his children. He would be
proud of me today—no matter how dull my speech.

On the other hand, I may be fortunate that my mother isn't here. It
isn't Mother's Day, so I can be honest. I loved her dearly, but she
could be a challenge. For example, when she learned I had been
nominated to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, she
phoned and said, "Don't think I'm impressed."

I know that there was a bit of controversy when my name was announced
as the graduation speaker. A few students were especially concerned
that I lacked celebrity status. It seemed I wasn't famous enough. I
couldn't agree more. As I have often told my wife and children, "I'm
simply not famous enough."

And that—in a more general and less personal sense—is the subject I
want to address today, the fact that we live in a culture that barely
acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts or artists.

There is an experiment I'd love to conduct. I'd like to survey a
cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players,
Major League Baseball players, and American Idol finalists they can
name.

Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights,
painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and
composers they can name.

I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social
thinkers they can name.

Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays,
and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least,
Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia
O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk,
Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

I don't think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture
was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a
broad range of human achievement.

I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak
English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed
Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with
comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like
Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert
Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis
Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.

The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert
Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general
interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average
American—because the culture considered them important.

Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of
arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our
national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or
altogether eliminated.

The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has
impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one.
When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or
entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young.

There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life
that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a
child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the
marketplace.

Of course, I'm not forgetting that politicians can also be famous, but
it is interesting how our political process grows more like the
entertainment industry each year. When a successful guest appearance
on the Colbert Report becomes more important than passing legislation,
democracy gets scary. No wonder Hollywood considers politics "show
business for ugly people."

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent
commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has
mostly become one vast infomercial.

I have a recurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine
Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo's incomparable fresco of the
"Creation of Man." I see God stretching out his arm to touch the
reclining Adam's finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is
holding a Diet Pepsi.

When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David
Letterman or Jay Leno who isn't trying to sell you something? A new
movie, a new TV show, a new book, or a new vote?

Don't get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market.
I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore
my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market
is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented
prosperity.

But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts
a price on everything.

The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not
focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all,
culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not
belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent
view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our
culture is failing us.

There is only one social force in America potentially large and strong
enough to counterbalance this profit-driven commercialization of
cultural values, our educational system, especially public education.
Traditionally, education has been one thing that our nation has agreed
cannot be left entirely to the marketplace—but made mandatory and
freely available to everyone.

At 56, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high
school in this country had a music program with choir and band,
usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even orchestra. And every high
school offered a drama program, sometimes with dance instruction. And
there were writing opportunities in the school paper and literary
magazine, as well as studio art training.

I am sorry to say that these programs are no longer widely available
to the new generation of Americans. This once visionary and democratic
system has been almost entirely dismantled by well-meaning but myopic
school boards, county commissioners, and state officials, with the
federal government largely indifferent to the issue. Art became an
expendable luxury, and 50 million students have paid the price. Today
a child's access to arts education is largely a function of his or her
parents' income.

In a time of social progress and economic prosperity, why have we
experienced this colossal cultural and political decline? There are
several reasons, but I must risk offending many friends and colleagues
by saying that surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame.
Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their
ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become
wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become
almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.

This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social, and
political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals,
and they need to reestablish their rightful place in the general
culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds
and the broader public, the results would not only transform society
but also artistic and intellectual life.

There is no better place to start this rapprochement than in arts
education. How do we explain to the larger society the benefits of
this civic investment when they have been convinced that the purpose
of arts education is mostly to produce more artists—hardly a
compelling argument to either the average taxpayer or financially
strapped school board?

We need to create a new national consensus. The purpose of arts
education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct.
The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings
capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

This is not happening now in American schools. Even if you forget the
larger catastrophe that only 70 percent of American kids now graduate
from high school, what are we to make of a public education system
whose highest goal seems to be producing minimally competent
entry-level workers?

The situation is a cultural and educational disaster, but it also has
huge and alarming economic consequences. If the United States is to
compete effectively with the rest of the world in the new global
marketplace, it is not going to succeed through cheap labor or cheap
raw materials, nor even the free flow of capital or a streamlined
industrial base. To compete successfully, this country needs continued
creativity, ingenuity, and innovation.

It is hard to see those qualities thriving in a nation whose
educational system ranks at the bottom of the developed world and has
mostly eliminated the arts from the curriculum.

I have seen firsthand the enormous transformative power of the arts—in
the lives of individuals, in communities, and even society at large.

Marcus Aurelius believed that the course of wisdom consisted of
learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging
ones. I worry about a culture that bit by bit trades off the
challenging pleasures of art for the easy comforts of entertainment.
And that is exactly what is happening—not just in the media, but in
our schools and civic life.

Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure—humor, thrills,
emotional titillation, or even the odd delight of being vicariously
terrified. It exploits and manipulates who we are rather than
challenges us with a vision of who we might become. A child who spends
a month mastering Halo or NBA Live on Xbox has not been awakened and
transformed the way that child would be spending the time rehearsing a
play or learning to draw.

If you don't believe me, you should read the statistical studies that
are now coming out about American civic participation. Our country is
dividing into two distinct behavioral groups. One group spends most of
its free time sitting at home as passive consumers of electronic
entertainment. Even family communication is breaking down as members
increasingly spend their time alone, staring at their individual
screens.

The other group also uses and enjoys the new technology, but these
individuals balance it with a broader range of activities. They go
out—to exercise, play sports, volunteer and do charity work at about
three times the level of the first group. By every measure they are
vastly more active and socially engaged than the first group.

What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens?
Curiously, it isn't income, geography, or even education. It depends
on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts.
These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of
individual awareness and social responsibility.

Why do these issues matter to you? This is the culture you are about
to enter. For the last few years you have had the privilege of being
at one of the world's greatest universities—not only studying, but
being a part of a community that takes arts and ideas seriously. Even
if you spent most of your free time watching Grey's Anatomy, playing
Guitar Hero, or Facebooking your friends, those important endeavors
were balanced by courses and conversations about literature, politics,
technology, and ideas.

Distinguished graduates, your support system is about to end. And you
now face the choice of whether you want to be a passive consumer or an
active citizen. Do you want to watch the world on a screen or live in
it so meaningfully that you change it?

That's no easy task, so don't forget what the arts provide.

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the
world—equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods.
Art addresses us in the fullness of our being—simultaneously speaking
to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory, and
physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be
expressed only as stories, or songs, or images.

Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. And it
remembers. As Robert Frost once said about poetry, "It is a way of
remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget." Art awakens,
enlarges, refines, and restores our humanity. You don't outgrow art.
The same work can mean something different at each stage of your life.
A good book changes as you change.

My own art is poetry, though my current daily life sometimes makes me
forget that. So let me end my remarks with a short poem appropriate to
the occasion.

[PRAISE TO THE RITUALS THAT CELEBRATE CHANGE]

Praise to the rituals that celebrate change,
old robes worn for new beginnings,
solemn protocol where the mutable soul,
surrounded by ancient experience, grows
young in the imagination's white dress.

Because it is not the rituals we honor
but our trust in what they signify, these rites
that honor us as witnesses—whether to watch
lovers swear loyalty in a careless world
or a newborn washed with water and oil.

So praise to innocence—impulsive and evergreen—
and let the old be touched by youth's
wayward astonishment at learning something new,
and dream of a future so fitting and so just
that our desire will bring it into being.