The Job of Changing Your Mind

This year, Holderness brought back a tradition we haven’t held in nearly a decade: Convocation. But rather than simply marking the start of another school year, our Academic Dean invited students to consider what it actually means to begin again. His message was simple, but challenging: school is one of the last places in your life where your job is to change your mind. 

In this Convocation address, he explores what it means to stay curious, question our assumptions, pay attention, and remain open to changing not only what we believe, but how we understand ourselves.

From Academic Dean, Jordan Graham

Holderness hasn’t held a convocation in something like eight years. And I suspect at least some of you saw “Convocation” on your schedule and wondered what exactly you were being required to attend.

Fair question.

A convocation is simply a formal calling together of a community. Schools and universities use them at moments that seem worth marking—a beginning, an ending, an accomplishment, a transition. This morning, we’re marking a beginning. You all know school is starting. I don’t think anyone woke up this morning confused about why 300 students had suddenly appeared on campus. So the question isn’t really whether we’re starting.

The reason to stop and gather like this is to ask a slightly harder question before everything gets moving: What exactly are we starting? And what are we here to do? There are lots of possible answers. But I want to suggest one this morning.

School is one of the last places in your life where your job is to change your mind.

I mean that in a couple of different ways. The obvious one is that you should change your mind about things you think you know. You should encounter ideas—or problems—that don’t behave the way you expect. You should be certain you’re right—and then discover that you’re not. You should find evidence that complicates what you thought you understood. You should read, calculate, experiment, or listen closely enough that your first answer becomes harder to defend.

And every once in a while, you should have the deeply annoying experience of realizing that the problem wasn’t the question. It was something you had assumed about the answer. That doesn’t mean walking around constantly changing your opinions. Conviction matters. You should have ideas you believe strongly and are willing to defend. But there’s a difference between having convictions and making yourself impossible to convince.

This is what a good education should do: make your ideas harder to change and make you more capable of changing them—because both holding onto an idea and letting it go should require stronger reasoning than what brought you to your original belief. And that’s our job as teachers. Not to tell you what you’re supposed to believe, but to give you the knowledge and tools to reach your own conclusions—and then make you work hard enough to defend them. But all of this requires something that has become surprisingly difficult. You have to pay attention.

Changing your mind requires giving something your attention before you’ve decided what you think about it. A book. A problem. An experiment. A piece of music. A teacher. Another person. To really pay attention to something is to admit, at least temporarily, that something other than yourself might deserve your full consideration.

And there’s another way I hope you change your mind this year. I hope you change your mind about yourself. All of us arrive here carrying stories about who we are. I’m a math person. I’m not a math person. I’m an athlete. I’m an artist. I hate reading. I’m bad at languages. Those descriptions aren’t necessarily bad. The problem comes when descriptions become conclusions.

One of the most dangerous things you can decide when you’re 15 or 16 or 17—or, for that matter, 38—is that you already know exactly who you are. You don’t. We don’t. We simply don’t have enough evidence yet.

Maybe the class you’re taking because it happened to fit into your schedule becomes the thing you can’t stop thinking about. Maybe something that has always come easily suddenly doesn’t. Maybe you discover that you’re good at something you’ve spent years avoiding. Maybe someone you don’t have much in common with changes the way you see the world. You don’t know yet. I think that’s one of the great privileges of being in school.

Zahra '27 addresses the student body in The Kistler Family Auditorium.

Let me provide an example via Zahra '27. Zahra was in my Post-War Intellectual History class last fall. At one point we read Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Hayek was an Austrian economist writing during World War II who was deeply concerned about centralized economic planning and what he believed it could mean for individual freedom. Heady stuff. And there was one argument in particular that Zahra hated. Hayek argues that even poverty can contain a kind of freedom—not because poverty is good, but because choice still belongs to the individual.

For example, imagine you have enough money for only one of two things you desperately need—food or medicine. It’s an awful choice. Zahra’s instinct was that calling that “freedom” was absurd. A person shouldn’t have to make that choice in the first place. They should be able to have both.

Hayek’s point was that, even in those terrible circumstances, there is something important about you deciding which need matters most, rather than having someone else—or the state—make that decision for you. Zahra’s vocal, scathing assessment of said argument was immediate, which is certainly one way to begin an intellectual inquiry. But then she kept reading. She kept arguing with him. She tried to understand why Hayek could look at that terrible situation and still see something important that needed protecting.

And the question became more complicated: if we eliminate a terrible choice by having someone else make the choice for you, what have we gained? And what, if anything, have we given up? Zahra still didn’t accept Hayek’s answer. But somewhere along the way, the goal stopped being deciding whether Hayek was repugnant and became trying to understand what Hayek was actually saying. Changing your mind doesn’t always mean changing your conclusion. Sometimes it means changing the quality of the thinking that got you there.

Zahra has become increasingly interested in the possibility that something might change her mind. She has had tremendous success on snow. That is an important part of who she is and a valued part of many Holderness students. But she knows it isn’t a complete answer to the question of who she is.

She loves ideas. She loves being challenged. And I think she is genuinely excited by the fact that she doesn’t yet know all of the things she’s going to care about or all of the things she’s going to become. Neither do you. And I hope you understand that. I hope I understand it about myself, too.

So as we begin this year, leave some things unsettled. Pay attention. Ask questions before you’ve decided on the answers. Be willing to discover that you’re wrong—and then figure out why. And maybe most importantly, don’t decide too quickly who you are.

If you arrive at the end of this year believing exactly the same things you believe today—about the world, about other people, and especially about yourself—then I think we will have missed something.

There will be plenty of time for certainty later. For now, and this morning in particular, you’re in school.