演讲稿是进行演讲的依据，是对演讲内容和形式的规范和提示，它体现着演讲的目的和手段。那么演讲稿该怎么写？想必这让大家都很苦恼吧。以下我给大家整理了一些优质的演讲稿模板范文，希望对大家能够有所帮助。
最新ted经典励志英文演讲稿通用一
(laughter)
camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. and on the very firstday our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that shesaid we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill campspirit. and it went like this: "r-o-w-d-i-e, thats the way we spell , rowdie, lets get rowdie." yeah. so i couldn figure out for the lifeof me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this wordincorrectly. (laughter) but i recited a cheer. i recited a cheer along witheverybody else. i did my best. and i just waited for the time that i could gooff and read my books.
but the first time that i took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girlin the bunk came up to me and she asked me, "why are you being so mellow?" --mellow, of course, being the e_act opposite of r-o-w-d-i-e. and then the secondtime i tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned e_pression on herface and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all workvery hard to be outgoing.
and so i put my books away, back in their suitcase, and i put them under mybed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. and i felt kind of guiltyabout this. i felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling outto me and i was forsaking them. but i did forsake them and i didn open thatsuitcase again until i was back home with my family at the end of thesummer.
now, i tell you this story about summer camp. i could have told you 50others just like it -- all the times that i got the message that somehow myquiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go,that i should be trying to pass as more of an e_trovert. and i always senseddeep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty e_cellent just asthey were. but for years i denied this intuition, and so i became a wall streetlawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that i had always longed to be --partly because i needed to prove to myself that i could be bold and assertivetoo. and i was always going off to crowded bars when i really would havepreferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. and i made theseself-negating choices so refle_ively, that i wasn even aware that i was makingthem.
now this is what many introverts do, and its our loss for sure, but it isalso our colleagues loss and our communities loss. and at the risk of soundinggrandiose, it is the worlds loss. because when it comes to creativity and toleadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. a third to a half of thepopulation are introverts -- a third to a half. so thats one out of every twoor three people you know. so even if you e an e_trovert yourself, im talkingabout your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sittingne_t to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deepand real in our society. we all internalize it from a very early age withouteven having a language for what we e doing.
now to see the bias clearly you need to understand what introversion s different from being shy. shyness is about fear of social ersion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including socialstimulation. so e_troverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereasintroverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their mostcapable when they e in quieter, more low-key environments. not all the time --these things aren absolute -- but a lot of the time. so the key then toma_imizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulationthat is right for us.
but now heres where the bias comes in. our most important institutions,our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for e_troverts and fore_troverts need for lots of stimulation. and also we have this belief systemright now that i call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity andall productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place.
so if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: when i was going toschool, we sat in rows. we sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most ofour work pretty autonomously. but nowadays, your typical classroom has pods ofdesks -- four or five or si_ or seven kids all facing each other. and kids areworking in countless group assignments. even in subjects like math and creativewriting, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are nowe_pected to act as committee members. and for the kids who prefer to go off bythemselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or,worse, as problem cases. and the vast majority of teachers reports believingthat the ideal student is an e_trovert as opposed to an introvert, even thoughintroverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according toresearch. (laughter)
okay, same thing is true in our workplaces. now, most of us work in openplan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gazeof our coworkers. and when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinelypassed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be verycareful, much less likely to take outsize risks -- which is something we mightall favor nowadays. and interesting research by adam grant at the wharton schoolhas found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than e_trovertsdo, because when they are managing proactive employees, they e much more likelyto let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an e_trovert can, quiteunwittingly, get so e_cited about things that they e putting their own stamp onthings, and other peoples ideas might not as easily then bubble up to thesurface.
now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have beenintroverts. ill give you some e_amples. eleanor roosevelt, rosa parks, gandhi-- all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies wastelling them not to. and this turns out to have a special power all its own,because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm, not because theyenjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at; theywere there because they had no choice, because they were driven to do what theythought was right.
now i think at this point its important for me to say that i actually lovee_troverts. i always like to say some of my best friends are e_troverts,including my beloved husband. and we all fall at different points, of course,along the introvert/e_trovert spectrum. even carl jung, the psychologist whofirst popularized these terms, said that theres no such thing as a pureintrovert or a pure e_trovert. he said that such a man would be in a lunaticasylum, if he e_isted at all. and some people fall smack in the middle of theintrovert/e_trovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. and i oftenthink that they have the best of all worlds. but many of us do recognizeourselves as one type or the other.
and what im saying is that culturally we need a much better balance. weneed more of a yin and yang between these two types. this is especiallyimportant when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because whenpsychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find arepeople who are very good at e_changing ideas and advancing ideas, but who alsohave a serious streak of introversion in them.
and this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned downdinner party invitations. theodor geisel, better known as dr. seuss, he dreamedup many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had inthe back of his house in la jolla, california. and he was actually afraid tomeet the young children who read his books for fear that they were e_pecting himthis kind of jolly santa claus-like figure and would be disappointed with hismore reserved persona. steve wozniak invented the first apple computer sittingalone in his cubical in hewlett-packard where he was working at the time. and hesays that he never would have become such an e_pert in the first place had henot been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up.
now of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating --and case in point, is steve wozniak famously coming together with steve jobs tostart apple computer -- but it does mean that solitude matters and that for somepeople it is the air that they breathe. and in fact, we have known for centuriesabout the transcendent power of solitude. its only recently that wevestrangely begun to forget it. if you look at most of the worlds majorreligions, you will find seekers -- moses, jesus, buddha, muhammad -- seekerswho are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness where they then haveprofound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of thecommunity. so no wilderness, no revelations.
this is no surprise though if you look at the insights of contemporarypsychology. it turns out that we can even be in a group of people withoutinstinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. even about seemingly personaland visceral things like who you e attracted to, you will start aping thebeliefs of the people around you without even realizing that thats what you edoing.
and groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismaticperson in the room, even though theres zero correlation between being the besttalker and having the best ideas -- i mean zero. so ... (laughter) you might befollowing the person with the best ideas, but you might not. and do you reallywant to leave it up to chance? much better for everybody to go off bythemselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of groupdynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in awell-managed environment and take it from there.
now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? why are wesetting up our schools this way and our workplaces? and why are we making theseintroverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of thetime? one answer lies deep in our cultural history. western societies, and inparticular the u.s., have always favored the man of action over the man ofcontemplation and "man" of contemplation. but in americas early days, we livedin what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point,valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. and if you lookat the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like"character, the grandest thing in the world." and they featured role models likeabraham lincoln who was praised for being modest and unassuming. ralph waldoemerson called him "a man who does not offend by superiority."
but then we hit the 20th century and we entered a new culture thathistorians call the culture of personality. what happened is we had evolved anagricultural economy to a world of big business. and so suddenly people aremoving from small towns to the cities. and instead of working alongside peopletheyve known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in acrowd of strangers. so, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism andcharisma suddenly come to seem really important. and sure enough, the self-helpbooks change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "how towin friends and influence people." and they feature as their role models reallygreat salesmen. so thats the world we e living in today. thats our culturalinheritance.
now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and im alsonot calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all. the same religions who sendtheir sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. and theproblems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are sovast and so comple_ that we are going to need armies of people coming togetherto solve them working together. but i am saying that the more freedom that wegive introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up withtheir own unique solutions to these problems.
so now id like to share with you whats in my suitcase today. guess what?books. i have a suitcase full of books. heres margaret atwood, "cats eye."heres a novel by milan kundera. and heres "the guide for the perple_ed" bymaimonides. but these are not e_actly my books. i brought these books with mebecause they were written by my grandfathers favorite authors.
my grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a smallapartment in brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when i was growingup, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence andpartly because it was filled with books. i mean literally every table, everychair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as asurface for swaying stacks of books. just like the rest of my family, mygrandfathers favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read.
but he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in thesermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. he wouldtakes the fruits of each weeks reading and he would weave these intricatetapestries of ancient and humanist thought. and people would come from all overto hear him speak.
but heres the thing about my grandfather. underneath this ceremonial role,he was really modest and really introverted -- so much so that when he deliveredthese sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregationthat he had been speaking to for 62 years. and even away from the podium, whenyou called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely forfear that he was taking up too much of your time. but when he died at the age of94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodatethe crowd of people who came out to mourn him. and so these days i try to learnfrom my grandfathers e_ample in my own way.
so i just published a book about introversion, and it took me about sevenyears to write. and for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because i wasreading, i was writing, i was thinking, i was researching. it was my version ofmy grandfathers hours of the day alone in his library. but now all of a suddenmy job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talkingabout introversion. (laughter) and thats a lot harder for me, because ashonored as i am to be here with all of you right now, this is not my naturalmilieu.
so i prepared for moments like these as best i could. i spent the last yearpracticing public speaking every chance i could get. and i call this my "year ofspeaking dangerously." (laughter) and that actually helped a lot. but ill tellyou, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes toour attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poisedon the brink on dramatic change. i mean, we are. and so i am going to leave younow with three calls for action for those who share this vision.
number one: stop the madness for constant group work. just stop it.(laughter) thank you. (applause) and i want to be clear about what im saying,because i deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chattycafe-style types of interactions -- you know, the kind where people cometogether and serendipitously have an e_change of ideas. that is great. itsgreat for introverts and its great for e_troverts. but we need much moreprivacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work. school, samething. we need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also needto be teaching them how to work on their own. this is especially important fore_troverted children too. they need to work on their own because that is wheredeep thought comes from in part.
okay, number two: go to the wilderness. be like buddha, have your ownrevelations. im not saying that we all have to now go off and build our owncabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but i am saying that wecould all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often.
number three: take a good look at whats inside your own suitcase and whyyou put it there. so e_troverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books. ormaybe they e full of champagne glasses or skyping equipment. whatever it is,i hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with yourenergy and your joy. but introverts, you being you, you probably have theimpulse to guard very carefully whats inside your own suitcase. and thatsokay. but occasionally, just occasionally, i hope you will open up yoursuitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs thethings you carry.
so i wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speaksoftly.
thank you very much.
(applause)
thank you. thank you.
最新ted经典励志英文演讲稿通用二
简介：残奥会短跑冠军aimeemullins天生没有腓骨，从小就要学习靠义肢走路和奔跑。如今，她不仅是短跑选手、演员、模特，还是一位稳健的演讲者。她不喜欢字典中“disabled”这个词，因为负面词汇足以毁掉一个人。但是，坦然面对不幸，你会发现等待你的是更多的机会。
id like to share with you a discovery that i made a few months ago whilewriting an article for italian wired. i always keep my thesaurus handy wheneverim writing anything, but id already finished editing the piece, and i realizedthat i had never once in my life looked up the word "disabled" to see what idfind.
let me read you the entry. "disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless,useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down,worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile,decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see alsohurt, useless and weak. antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." i was reading thislist out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, butid just gotten past "mangled," and my voice broke, and i had to stop andcollect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from thesewords unleashed.
you know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so im thinking thismust be an ancient print date, right? but, in fact, the print date was the early1980s, when i would have been starting primary school and forming anunderstanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kidsand the world around me. and, needless to say, thank god i wasn using athesaurus back then. i mean, from this entry, it would seem that i was born intoa world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever goingfor them, when in fact, today im celebrated for the opportunities andadventures my life has procured.
so, i immediately went to look up the __ online edition, e_pecting to finda revision worth noting. heres the updated version of this unately, its not much better. i find the last two words under "nearantonyms," particularly unsettling: "whole" and "wholesome."
so, its not just about the words. its what we believe about people whenwe name them with these words. its about the values behind the words, and howwe construct those values. our language affects our thinking and how we view theworld and how we view other people. in fact, many ancient societies, includingthe greeks and the romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was sopowerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into e_istence. so, whatreality do we want to call into e_istence: a person who is limited, or a personwhos empowered? by casually doing something as simple as naming a person, achild, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. wouldn wewant to open doors for them instead?
one such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the institute in wilmington, delaware. his name was dr. pizzutillo, anitalian american, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most americansto pronounce, so he went by dr. p. and dr. p always wore really colorful bowties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children.
i loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with thee_ception of my physical therapy sessions. i had to do what seemed likeinnumerable repetitions of e_ercises with these thick, elastic bands --different colors, you know -- to help build up my leg muscles, and i hated thesebands more than anything -- i hated them, had names for them. i hated them. and,you know, i was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with dr. p to tryto get out of doing these e_ercises, unsuccessfully, of course. and, one day, hecame in to my session -- e_haustive and unforgiving, these sessions -- and hesaid to me, "wow. aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, i thinkyou e going to break one of those bands. when you do break it, im going togive you a hundred bucks."
now, of course, this was a simple ploy on dr. ps part to get me to do thee_ercises i didn want to do before the prospect of being the richestfive-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me wasreshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising e_perience for i have to wonder today to what e_tent his vision and his declaration of meas a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as aninherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future.
this is an e_ample of how adults in positions of power can ignite the powerof a child. but, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, ourlanguage isn allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want,the possibility of an inpidual to see themselves as capable. our languagehasn caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have beenbrought about by technology. certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs,laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements foraging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities,and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them -- not to mentionsocial networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their owndescriptions of themselves, so they can go align with global groups of their ownchoosing. so, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what hasalways been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer oursociety, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset.
the human ability to adapt, its an interesting thing, because people havecontinually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and im going tomake an admission: this phrase never sat right with me, and i always felt uneasytrying to answer peoples questions about it, and i think im starting to figureout why. implicit in this phrase of "overcoming adversity" is the idea thatsuccess, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenginge_perience unscathed or unmarked by the e_perience, as if my successes in lifehave come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumedpitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as mydisability. but, in fact, we are changed. we are marked, of course, by achallenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. and im going to suggestthat this is a good thing. adversity isn an obstacle that we need to getaround in order to resume living our life. its part of our life. and i tend tothink of it like my shadow. sometimes i see a lot of it, sometimes theres verylittle, but its always with me. and, certainly, im not trying to diminish theimpact, the weight, of a persons struggle.
there is adversity and challenge in life, and its all very real andrelative to every single person, but the question isn whether or not you egoing to meet adversity, but how you e going to meet it. so, our responsibilityis not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them tomeet it well. and we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel thatthey e not equipped to adapt. theres an important difference and distinctionbetween the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjectivesocietal opinion of whether or not im disabled. and, truthfully, the only realand consistent disability ive had to confront is the world ever thinking that icould be described by those definitions.
in our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hardtruth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the e_pectedquality of their life, we have to make sure that we don put the first brick ina wall that will actually disable someone. perhaps the e_isting model of onlylooking at what is broken in you and how do we fi_ it, serves to be moredisabling to the inpidual than the pathology itself.
by not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging theirpotency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle theymight have. we are effectively grading someones worth to our community. so weneed to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. and,most importantly, theres a partnership between those perceived deficiencies andour greatest creative ability. so its not about devaluing, or negating, thesemore trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, butinstead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. so maybe the ideai want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is openingourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term,maybe even dancing with it. and, perhaps, if we see adversity as natural,consistent and useful, we e less burdened by the presence of it.
this year we celebrate the 200th birthday of charles darwin, and it was 150years ago, when writing about evolution, that darwin illustrated, i think, atruth about the human character. to paraphrase: its not the strongest of thespecies that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is theone that is most adaptable to change. conflict is the genesis of creation. fromdarwins work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability tosurvive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit throughconflict into transformation. so, again, transformation, adaptation, is ourgreatest human skill. and, perhaps, until we e tested, we don know what we emade of. maybe thats what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of ourown power. so, we can give ourselves a gift. we can re-imagine adversity assomething more than just tough times. maybe we can see it as change. adversityis just change that we haven adapted ourselves to yet.
i think the greatest adversity that weve created for ourselves is thisidea of normalcy. now, whos normal? theres no normal. theres common, therestypical. theres no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige personif they e_isted? (laughter) i don think so. if we can change this paradigmfrom one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility -- or potency, to be even alittle bit more dangerous -- we can release the power of so many more children,and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with thecommunity.
anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have alwaysrequired of our community members is to be of use, to be able to s evidence that neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly andthose with serious physical injury, and perhaps its because the life e_perienceof survival of these people proved of value to the community. they didn viewthese people as broken and useless; they were seen as rare and valuable.
a few years ago, i was in a food market in the town where i grew up in thatred zone in northeastern pennsylvania, and i was standing over a bushel oftomatoes. it was summertime: i had shorts on. i hear this guy, his voice behindme say, "well, if it isn aimee mullins." and i turn around, and its thisolder man. i have no idea who he is.
and i said, "im sorry, sir, have we met? i don remember meetingyou."
he said, "well, you wouldn remember meeting me. i mean, when we met i wasdelivering you from your mothers womb." (laughter) oh, that guy. and, but ofcourse, actually, it did click.
this man was dr. kean, a man that i had only known about through mymothers stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, i arrivedlate for my birthday by two weeks. and so my mothers prenatal physician hadgone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to myparents. and, because i was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turnedin, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer-- this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news.
he said to me, "i had to give this prognosis to your parents that you wouldnever walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids haveor any kind of life of independence, and youve been making liar out of me eversince." (laughter) (applause)
the e_traordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippingsthroughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee,marching with the girl scouts, you know, the halloween parade, winning mycollege scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, andintegrating it into teaching resident students, med students from hahnemannmedical school and hershey medical school. and he called this part of the coursethe _ factor, the potential of the human will. no prognosis can account for howpowerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someones life. anddr. kean went on to tell me, he said, "in my e_perience, unless repeatedly toldotherwise, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices,a child will achieve."
see, dr. kean made that shift in thinking. he understood that theres adifference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. andtheres been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at15 years old, if i would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, iwouldn have hesitated for a second. i aspired to that kind of normalcy backthen. but if you ask me today, im not so sure. and its because of thee_periences ive had with them, not in spite of the e_periences ive had withthem. and perhaps this shift in me has happened because ive been e_posed tomore people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and castshadows on me.
see, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your ownpower, and you e off. if you can hand somebody the key to their own power --the human spirit is so receptive -- if you can do that and open a door forsomeone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. you eteaching them to open doors for themselves. in fact, the e_act meaning of theword "educate" comes from the root word "educe." it means "to bring forth whatis within, to bring out potential." so again, which potential do we want tobring out?
there was a case study done in 1960s britain, when they were moving fromgrammar schools to comprehensive schools. its called the streaming trials. wecall it "tracking" here in the states. its separating students from a, b, c, dand so on. and the "a students" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers,etc. well, they took, over a three-month period, d-level students, gave themas, told them they were "as," told them they were bright, and at the end ofthis three-month period, they were performing at a-level.
and, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that theytook the "a students" and told them they were "ds." and thats what happened atthe end of that three-month period. those who were still around in school,besides the people who had dropped out. a crucial part of this case study wasthat the teachers were duped too. the teachers didn know a switch had beenmade. they were simply told, "these are the a-students, these are thed-students.\" and thats how they went about teaching them and treatingthem.
so, i think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spiritthats been crushed doesn have hope, it doesn see beauty, it no longer hasour natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. if instead,we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves andothers, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and newways of being.
id like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century persian poetnamed hafiz that my friend, jacques dembois told me about, and the poem iscalled "the god who only knows four words": "every child has known god, not thegod of names, not the god of don s, but the god who only knows four words andkeeps repeating them, saying, come dance with me. come, dance with me. come,dance with me.\"
thank you. (applause)
