Speech for Opening Ceremony for Freshmen of 2015

Tao Wenhao

10 September, 2015Good evening, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen. Warmly welcome to the School of Foreign Languages, Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai (BNUZ). It is Teacher’s Day today. Happy Teacher’s Day! Happy Teacher’s Day to my colleagues!

The School of Foreign Languages was established on June 16th, 2003 and it is one of the largest schools of the university. Numerous outstanding students graduated from our faculty over the past 12 years. On this very special day, I am as excited as you, and I think that the university time is the purest, truest, and most genuine time of our school days. This is the time when we have to work together to start the new chapter of our life. In this amazingly beautiful place with the blue sky, the green grass, the unknown and smiling trees, the quiet lakes and the strong mountains around, I sincerely hope that you could achieve well both in academics and career with your strenuous efforts. I have confidence that each of you, youthful and full of spirit, will be the 21 century elite with vision, mind and wisdom.

The School of Foreign Languages is only 12 years old, still very young in the long history of human society. Just because she is young in the same youth as you who are full of energy and vitality with 78 members of staff. Of all the teaching staff members, there are 28 native teachers of English or Japanese which accounts for nearly a half. Besides more than 1,149 students of English and Japanese majors we have, the School of Foreign Languages undertakes the foreign language teaching of about 24, 000 non-English majors of the university.

You may want to know the teaching quality of the school, here I have chosen some data of our BA graduates for MA studies both home and abroad in the recent three years.

Year Total number of MA Total number of graduates Percentage of MA

2013 45 217 20.74%

2014 46 353 13.03%

2015 39 327 11.93%

Top 10 for MA in the recent three years

The tables above may highly encourage you for further studies after your four years of BA with us. They are good examples for you to go to the most prestigious universities for further studies.

Standing here today, I do not intend to go on with the platitude. Instead, I would like to discuss with you about why we should receive education, particularly higher education. And I would like to introduce to you the famous speech “This is Water” given by American writer David Foster Wallace, which is about the true meaning of education. In the speech, he first gave an example of the different attitudes we can choose to feel about the same boring and annoying day. For example, after a long day at work, we have to drive to the supermarket to buy groceries and go through the traffic jams, crowded isles and long checkout lines. So we can choose to feel angry and miserable, like David says, “Thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It is the automatic way that I experience the boring and, frustrating, crowded part of adult life when I am operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world”

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. … The only thing that is True is that you get to decide how you are gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over again.

My dear boys and girls, the nature of education is to help us learn how to think, and how to control our view of the world. I sincerely hope that throughout your undergraduate or postgraduate study, you could be trained to have the thinking mode of the well-educated, learn to keep the self-awareness, understand what is important to you and be able to control your mind. In the meantime, may the university education give you the real freedom of choice.

For the students of School of Foreign Languages, we have special requirements for you. We would like to train you to be the person of thinking in different perspectives and the person of creativity. You are different from others in that you receive the education of mixed cultures, the ones from the east and the ones from the west. Whatever is good is your food and help you to grow and finalize you to make the right choice. So you have no opportunity to make mistakes in choices. You can always make the best choice. Remember you are the best!

May I share with you something that happened to me today? Early in the morning I kept receiving continuous text messages over my mobile phone, I assumed that they were all fond greetings for me for the Teacher’s Day today. I was right but after I finished reading about 20 of them, I suddenly realized something. What is it? They were all from Students of 2004 who graduated in 2008. There were too many messages to finish reading in a moment. By reading mere I could not control my tears because I realized that they had agreed earlier they would send greeting messages to me today. It was a pleasant surprise for me. Students of 2004 were the first cohort of English majors of our faculty. They had too many “firsts” in the history of English education in the School of Foreign Languages, today they created another first. It is the first time in my life that I received so many greetings for Teacher’s Day from one grade. Here is just one message I quote for you: Dear Professor Tao, You’ve done wonders with me: By enlightening me with your wisdom; Transforming me with your intellect; And working diligently with perseverance. Thanks for making me what I am today. Happy Teachers’ Day!!

So at the end of my speech today, I have a new reflection of education. Besides what I said above, another meaning of higher education is to initiate love, broad love to you all, and let each of you be the person of love, in love and for love.

My dear boys and girls, no matter what your dream is, either to be a translator, a diplomat, a teacher, or even a PhD, I have full confidence in you and wish you all a prosperous future.

Thank you!