Dr. Grauer's Column - A Letter to the Graduates

A Letter to Graduates and Their Friends, Families, Teachers, and Future Selves
By Stuart Grauer

Dear Graduates, Families, Teachers, and Friends,

Today and this season, we celebrate a commencement, but also something more rare. We celebrate a childhood. I know, I know, you are supposed to be coming of age now, not being childish, so please hear me out and for once I’ll be brief. As Dr. Seuss says, you’ve got places to go.

It’s just this: The Grauer’s Gorilla, our school mascot, is far from the only endangered species. You have grown up in a time when childhood itself is becoming endangered. Recent studies show that many American children are growing up with less freedom, less independence, less unsupervised exploration, and fewer opportunities simply to be children. (This also can be tied to more anxiety and depression, and less sense of empowerment.) In our country, many teenagers today have never wandered far from home on their own, never organized their own adventures as all of you have, never discovered who they are apart from adult direction and oversight.

Yet you have managed to hold onto something precious. When we look at our graduates, we see something different.

We can see young people who have hiked trails, studied stars that have permanently lit up their eyes, built friendships around campfires (that have lit up their eyes), performed on stages, debated around Harkness tables, explored cities and wild places, cared for one another, taken risks, made and mourned mistakes, recovered!, and grown stronger because of all this. I also see young people who have been trusted.

One of my deepest hopes is that we as teachers and parents have helped preserve, protect, and nurture your childhood—not as a waiting room for adulthood, but as an amazing, exciting stage of life worthy of trust and respect.

Play, curiosity, exploration, friendship, wonder, discovery, and adventure are not distractions from education. They are education. Please, please take that fact with you to college, on the road, and/or wherever your trail leads you. They are the oldest and most powerful ways human beings—of all ages—learn and discover joyful lives.

You all know better than anyone now that youths are designed to grow toward independence. Your natural goal is not dependence but capability; not compliance but personal responsibility; not just achievement but becoming more fully human: exercising your mind and body in ways you could hardly have dreamed of no so long ago.

And I have learned this from you: When young people are trusted with freedom, they generally rise to meet it. Thank you! That has always been one of the deepest hopes of The Grauer School.

We have wanted you to experience learning not as something done to you, but as something you do. As a freeing experience. We have wanted you to discover that your voice matters, your choices matter--and that your life can become an adventure of your own making.

Families, it is your trust and courage that make all this freedom and self-direction possible—as we have led our students into the campus of the world. We all live in a culture that commonly confuses constant supervision with love—but you entrusted your children to a school that believes in discovery, expeditions, and self-advocacy. You allowed them to climb rocks, navigate challenges, solve extremely complicated problems in and out of class, and find their own strengths.

To our teachers, thank you for understanding that education is not merely the transfer of information. It is the deep study and cultivation of individual human beings. It is helping and role-modelling as young people become capable, compassionate, resilient, and joyful. This is the understanding that has made you real teachers—and this, too, takes courage.

My closing wish for this year:  Graduates, may you never entirely outgrow your childhood.

I don’t mean childishness. I mean the qualities that make childhood so valuable: curiosity, playfulness, courage, imagination, wonder, openness, and the willingness to step into the unknown. Don’t ever let anyone make you feel or think you need to outgrow childhood, or that you are not free.

Please keep exploring. Keep asking questions, even crazy ones. Try your own trails, even if you don’t know their end—you never can really know that, anyway. Keep gathering around tables where people are known and heard and where you can look them in the eye. A life of childhood means a life of friendship, nature, creativity, and joy.

Whenever the world tries to convince you that life is mainly about credentials, competition, or getting ahead, remember what you learned here:  A good life is not measured only by what you accomplish. It is measured by what you discover, and how open you stay to discovery.

Congratulations, Class of 2026! May you carry your childhood with you for the rest of your lives.

With admiration and gratitude,

Stuart Grauer
Founder
The Grauer School

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