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. Â I think there are too many negative connotations in summarizing the speech into those three words. Â And it misses the context and the meaning put into those three words. Â 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.
