Last Tuesday afternoon, some 400 members of our community came together to celebrate the High School Graduation of our 92 Terminale students, the Class of 2013. And what a memorable occasion it was, not just because such moments are by their very nature moving, but because the wonderful ceremony we organized allowed us to pay tribute to a remarkable group of young people who have transformed the Lycée Français de New York for the better and who next year will be attending some of the best universities in the world. Our heartfelt gratitude and congratulations to them all. May they return to visit us soon! Below is an extract from the address I had the privilege of giving in their honor.
“As you prepare to leave us, dear Class of 2013, what we would kindly encourage you to do first and foremost is to stay true to the person you have become, for we who have had the pleasure of getting to know you understand just how unique you are. Consider the marvels you have worked in academic terms each and every year you have been with us, demonstrating time and time again your exceptional ability to master our demanding bilingual, bicultural program, regardless of the track and form of French Baccalaureate you have prepared, while at the same time showing an intellectual curiosity which far transcends the confines of our formal curriculum: you LOVE learning!
And outside of the classroom as well, your athletic, musical, debating, theatrical, artistic and innumerable other qualities have greatly impressed us. Whether on the basketball court, in a jazz orchestra or in some other dimension of your prodigious co-curricular lives, you have always taken up new challenges, set yourself new objectives, launched new initiatives. No wonder you have had such outstanding college admissions this past spring: those renowned places of higher education you will be attending in France, Switzerland, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States have chosen you for good reason.
And yet even as we encourage you to stay true to yourselves, dear students, we encourage you too to put those infinite qualities in the service of others, for as I am confident you would agree: with privilege comes responsibility. In making this assertion, I am reminded of a story about one of the great heroes of our time, Dr. Paul Farmer, a professor at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Partners in Health, one of the most respected non-governmental organizations in the world, bringing health care and medical training to the poorest of poor people around the globe, in countries like Rwanda, Malawi and Lesotho.
Dr. Farmer recounts how as a recent graduate from Harvard Medical School, he had gone to Haiti to spend a few months building a medical clinic which would provide free health care to families who had none. One day, after walking 15 kilometers to give a speech to a group of community health workers, full of a sense of accomplishment for having hiked so far, and ready to make the long trek back to his residence before the hastening nightfall, Dr. Farmer was approached by someone pleading with him to walk several more kilometers in the opposite direction to visit a very sick man, someone who was having difficulty breathing.
At first, Dr. Farmer said no, adding something he would remember for the rest of his life, “I didn’t even bring my stethoscope”, as if all of his medical vocation could be summed up in an instrument he had learned to use rather than in the person he had become through his medical studies. Yet no sooner had he uttered these words than he also understood the weakness of his response and left to the find to the suffocating patient.
What he found was a man suffering horribly from asthma, so badly in fact that his lips were purple, every muscle in his body was “corded and tensed”, each painful breath sounded like it might be his last. Dr. Farmer was shocked that the man, whose name was Jean, had suffered a ferocious attack of status asthmaticus and had been gasping for breath for 24 hours without the slightest help. Asking himself what he could do to save this man’s life, Dr. Farmer felt an empathetic clutching in his own chest and suddenly remembered that he too suffered from asthma. And reaching into his pocket, he found an inhaler full of albuterol and immediately set to work trying to see if Jean would somehow be able to inhale some of the medicine, which Jean did and survived.
It is this experience some 25 years ago which led Dr. Farmer to devote his entire life to helping people like Jean. So mundane in the US health care system that he had completely forgotten he was carrying it that day in rural Haiti, for him the inhaler became symbolic of the countless privileges which he felt he had inherited by being born in the United States, growing up in a relatively affluent family, being educated at an outstanding high school, a top-notch university and a world-class medical program. For Dr. Farmer, the inhaler became an emblem of all of the gifts with which he had been endowed and now felt he owed it to the world to share with all those who had not had the same opportunities in life as he had enjoyed. Please remember this story, dear Class of 2013. We encourage you to stay true to yourselves as you embrace the future and to think of yourselves as treasures for the world — treasures whose greatest value comes when it is given to others, when it is placed in the service of those less fortunate than ourselves.”
About the Author :
Sean Lynch was Head of School at the Lycée Français de New York from 2011 to 2018, after having spent 15 years at another French bilingual school outside of Paris: the Lycée International de St. Germain-en-Laye. Holding both French and American nationalities, educated in France (Sciences Po Paris) and the United States (Yale), and as the proud husband of a French-American spouse and father of two French-American daughters, Sean Lynch has spent his entire professional and personal life at the junction between the languages, cultures and educational systems of France and the United States. In addition to being passionate about education, he loves everything related to the mountains, particularly the Parc National du Mercantour.