KIT FOUNDERS FAMILY MESSAGE

Thank you for inviting me as a member of the Roeper family to your graduation ceremony

It is fitting for this occasion to occur in a synagogue, as my mother, Annemarie Roeper, was from a secular Jewish family, and my father went to the school run by her parents Her family had a complicated relationship with their Jewish past As was the case with many German-Jewish families, my mother’s family preferred to minimize their Jewish heritage; my mother learned that she was Jewish only in her teens This heritage, however, played a role in my parents’ thinking about the world and education

My parents were principally humanists, a philosophic approach to life, which includes many Jewish values

Humanism sees human beings as having dignity, individuality, and agency, and being the central source of values, ethics, and justice From these views flows a commitment to an equitable, diverse society, based on human rights

Humanism is an optimistic view that with the combination of individual and collective human capabilities, the world’s problems can be addressed For my parents, humanism is a secular perspective that does not rely on religion, miracles, mystical thinking, or blindly following a charismatic leader What it does rely on is the human capacity for rational critical thinking: the ability to look at the world logically and with reason to make decisions based on facts and evidence One faces facts, one does not make them up

Developing critical thinking skills, as my parents understood, is essential to learning and can provide you with a sense of wonderment about the world and a style of thinking that is of lifelong benefit

Critical thinking is central to humanism and seeing the world clearly with a firm basis for one’s perspective Such thinking is not just a technique that one applies to solve problems or issues of science, but also an approach to life: a style of always wondering why, always asking questions, always seeking more answers, and relying on our intellect to interpret the world

Critical thinking is also essential to working through the many ethical issues we face today and guiding one to a strong ethical foundation Critical thinking, however, is not just a method to try to reach certainty, it is also crucial to understanding how the same event can be seen and experienced in many different, even opposite ways

In fact, critical thinking helps us understand and appreciate that each of us has complex, changing, often inconsistent emotional lives As we live through different experiences and emotions, we are often confronted with ambivalence, ambiguity, and confusion, which can lead to anger, self-doubt, and distrust Thinking can help us manage our way through our emotional lives and understand the emotional lives of others Also, when we begin to grasp how other people think and feel, we foster the crucial ability to empathize and develop humility

These ideas, humanism, critical rational thinking, ethics, and understanding of human psychology are central to the way my parents designed the school Mostly they wanted a school that respected people and appreciated the uniqueness of every child They wanted their students to become citizens of the world and have fulfilling emotional and intellectual lives

Hopefully, as you move into adulthood, you are comfortable with this humanistic perspective, which will enrich your own lives and the world around you

Hopefully, you will use your critical thinking skills to resist our culture’s old and new shibboleths or assumptions and see the world in new ways

Hopefully, you will proceed with both an ethical foundation and a willingness to permit those ethical views to change and grow based on your life experiences

And hopefully, you will use the experiences in the school to understand that people see and feel the world in many different ways, and arrogance or sanctimony is less appropriate than understanding

Thank you for listening F