“No Excuse, Sir”
This is an address presented to high school students and their parents and teachers.
Each time I conduct one of these awards ceremonies, I spend some time thinking about what it is that separates those who are successful students from those who are not. What characteristics do the successful possess? Though it will probably strike you as strange, in order to discuss this subject this morning, I intend to talk about Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and original sin. As an English teacher, I am constantly amazed that few young people have heard of Adam and Eve or Eden. And the idea of sin has been banished from America by lawyers who understand that legality is more profitable than morality.
So let me tell you briefly about Adam and Eve. In the Bible, they are the first man and woman. The story goes that God created them and put them in an earthly paradise called the Garden of Eden. There they could do anything they wanted–except eat the fruit from the tree that grew in the middle of the garden. Unfortunately, Satan took the form of a snake and tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, usually depicted as an apple. Eve took a bite and talked Adam into taking a bite. And that act of disobedience, defying God’s one command, was humanity’s first or original sin. In Christian theology, each of us inherited this sin. It’s like a bad gene passed from generation to generation for eternity. As a result of Adam’s and Eve’s sin, we are all sinners.
I agree with this Biblical assessment of things: We are all sinners. However, the sin is not, in my view, disobedience of God’s command. I have a different sense of the flaw in our nature, our sin. It lies in this piece of the story as written in the book of Genesis. This takes place after Adam and Eve have eaten the apple:
And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And [Adam] said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid . . . And [God] said, . . . Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
The sin I see here is Adam’s and Eve’s pathetic refusal to take responsibility for their disobedience. God asks Adam if he ate the apple, and he says Eve made me do it. And God asks Eve, and she says the devil made to do it. This is my non-Christian view of our original sin. This is the curse of our human nature–this fundamental inability to take responsibility for our actions.
So unusual is it for people to accept responsibility that, when someone does, it is big news. Look what happened when Attorney General Janet Reno accepted responsibility for the David Koresh disaster. Headlines. General awe. Decades after President Harry Truman said, “The buck stops here,” we continue to view him as an aberration worthy of respect.
I believe that the students we honor here this morning are young people who are learning to take responsibility. They are learning this lesson by taking responsibility for their education. The fact is that you can’t learn anything unless you do take responsibility for learning it. I grant you that taking responsibility for learning differs from taking responsibility for your social behavior. People who study hard, who do their homework thoughtfully and consistently, who believe that their learning depends on what they do rather than what is done to them or for them–these people might still behave like Adam and Eve when confronted by an angry god. However, I think they are less likely to.
Taking responsibility for your education means that you understand that your actions produce results. Once you understand this relationship between action and consequence, once you perceive of yourself as an agent of action, you are well on your way to having the strength to accept responsibility for all your actions. The Marines have a different, more direct approach to educating young people to accept responsibility for their actions. In a training film I once saw, the drill sergeant asked a recruit why he had made some sort of error. The recruit looked straight ahead and, as he’d been taught, yelled, “No excuse, sir!”
One thing does lead to another. It is possible for people to learn the habit of responsibility. And those who learn this lesson may be more inclined to believe that they can have some sort of control over their lives. Those who don’t learn this lesson, those who rely on excuses, are doomed to succumb to the curse of human nature–our tendency to avoid responsibility. They are more inclined to believe that success and failure are simply a matter of luck. Good grades result from lucky breaks; bad grades result from bad luck. This is the psychology of the victim. Life happens to us; it’s not our fault. It’s Eve’s fault. The devil made me do it.
I spend a lot of time meeting with students in academic trouble, and I am forever amazed at the number of excuses I hear for their poor performance. Mr. So-and-So doesn’t like me. I got sick and missed school, and I couldn’t catch up. My life is falling apart. I have a learning disability. I’m no good at math. My roommate won’t let me study. My parents want me to work weekends.
Many of these excuses are good ones. They do present students with real problems. The trouble with excuses, though, is that they remove responsibility for the failure from the person doing the failing. Adam blames Eve and deludes himself into believing that he is not responsible for taking a bite of the apple. A student blames her illness and shifts the responsibility for her learning from herself, from her own actions. What’s the result? Failure. The fact is that for her to learn, for her to be successful, she must take action. But she can’t take action if she feels no responsibility for her situation.
In contrast, successful students behave differently. The excuse becomes an assessment of the problem instead of an excuse. That is, the student recognizes that her illness has caused her to fall behind. That’s the problem, and it’s real. Now she determines what action she needs to take to overcome that problem. She might seek out her teacher to devise a make-up schedule and get some extra help. She might decide to work with a tutor. She might begin spending more free time in the library instead of socializing. While the unsuccessful student defines the problem as an excuse not to act, the successful one defines the problem so that she can understand what action she needs to take. She takes responsibility for her education.
This sort of responsible behavior defines the difference between adults and children. Children are in a state of dependency and rely on the rest of the world to assume responsibility for them. Adults seize the responsibility and understand that their fate is in their own hands. Age has little to do with it. I know several students who are adults, and I know too many older people who are children.
In fact, our society tends to reinforce the irresponsible behavior that seems so typically human in Adam and Eve. We have become a society of victims–people who want no responsibility for anything that happens. Our environment is to blame. Our parents didn’t give us enough love. Our hormones have run amok. Our genes are misshapen. We live in an age of no fault insurance–a metaphor for our times. We have a legal system devoted to the proposition that anyone with enough money has a good shot at avoiding the consequences of his actions.
I’ll tell you a true story. It happened at a school in New York. One of the French teachers gave his class an essay assignment instead of a final exam. When he took the papers to grade them, he found that all of his 11 students had cheated. They hadn’t written their own essays. In fact, one student’s mother had hired a writer to write her son’s essay. She admitted it. And when the report card arrived with the inevitable F, she had a lawyer call the school and threaten to sue the teacher and the school. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what this parent was teaching her child.
It seems a miracle that anyone today becomes a responsible adult. The practices of our society conspire with our human tendency to avoid responsibility. Perhaps you can understand, then, my admiration for those here today who are learning to take responsibility by accepting responsibility for their education. They represent hope–the hope that comes from understanding that humans can affect the course of their lives. As you take more responsibility for the life you are living, as you suppress your natural desire to offer excuses, you will become more successful people.
Adam and Eve might have left the garden of Eden with some shred of dignity had they behaved like that Marine recruit. When God asked them, “What is that thou hast done,” they might have answered, “No excuse, sir!”
Alden Blodget retired from a lifetime in schools as student, teacher, administrator, parent, and trustee. He currently is a volunteer tutor. This speech is one of many that he collected and published in a book, Dead Man Talking.
Like most of the pictures on TeensParentsTeachers, the picture posted with this article is courtesy of a free download from Pixabay.com.