David Foster Wallace’s speech at Kenyon College in 2005 delivered a different type of commencement address. He talks about how it is human nature for people to automatically think about themselves first (Wallace XIII). People do not think about what the person next to them is going through they just think about their situation and what they need (Wallace XIII). This has a lot of truth to it. When a person is in a line somewhere, by the time he gets to the cashier he is grumpy. People do not think about how long the cashiers day might have been. Instead, people think they are not good at their job or can’t they afford to have more checkout lines open? People fail to think maybe someone called in sick, maybe this is the cashier’s first day, or maybe some unexpected problem occurred. Being educated is not just knowing information from your textbook in your university degree, it is about how to learn to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. By doing this person will eliminate a lot of annoyance in everyday life and prevent many problems. Again, David Foster Wallace makes the point that being educated is so much more than just knowing things; it is building a person’s character, so what is the true education? And does this true education could be learned from the universities?

On education, David Foster Wallace accurately calls attention to that what passes off for "education" is an exceptionally shallow bastardization of the genuine goal and ideal target of a true education. A true education includes mindfulness, discipline, and attentiveness, and has much less to do with true information or rote learning. David Foster Wallace joins a True education with the decrease of haughtiness and the improvement of quietude in oneself, through turning out to be fundamentally mindful of one's restrictions, and the constraints of one's own musings and discernment, while being aware of courses in which we build importance as a matter of fact.

David Foster Wallace mentioned some sentences to educate people and to show them another way to think about things. One of these sentences is, “ there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of” (Wallace XII). He meant here that every person sees him/herself always the center of anything he/she does. Also, he/she sees him/herself as the hero of all his/her stories, even when a person imagines anything, he/she always sees him/herself as the director of everything going on in that experience. Moreover. David Foster Wallace mentions that even when someone tells a story to a friend, the friend always imagine him/herself as the center of the story and wish it would not happen to him/her in the future if it is a bad story, or the opposite if it is a happy story. Also, David Foster Wallace mentioned another sentence which is “learning how to think really means how to exercise some control over how and what you think”(Wallace XIII).  It’s mean that adults should learn how to focus on one thing specifically and try not to be hypnotized by the constant monologue in their heads. However, hypnotizing by the constant monologue in your head happens frequently for people. For example: the most unfortunate thing happen to a college student is that they think of different things that they willing to do or suppose to do in their life’s at the time the professor is explaining an important thing in the lecture. For that, David Foster Wallace repeated that people should exercise how to not be hypnotized and focus on what they need.

The author also mentioned some repeated words like the word “death”. He repeated this word in more than one place in different meanings. For instance, the author mentioned the word death on paragraph fourteen by saying “the absolute voice of death”(Wallace XIV). Here death was meant in a hyperbole way. The author was talking here about long cashier lines on supermarkets and how people can be grumpy or sometimes turn crazy from the cashiers without knowing the reason beyond that, so the author wants us to assume that the cashier has some issues that make him/her tired or not in the working mood. However, after they finish your checkout they told you ‘Have a nice day” with that deadly voice that means they are tired, which proves that they went through a rough day. And that what we need to know is that not everybody has like our situation or better, some people have a terrible situation, so they are not able to serve you in the perfect way. David Foster Wallace repeated the word “death” in different places to touch the audience feeling to let them imagine in an exaggeration way how the people like the cashiers were tired from their jobs like everyone else.  

In this essay David Foster Wallace wants to keep the reader intrigued, he wouldn't like to appear like a contradicting bossy figure to the reader by apparently simply letting us know what to do. He puts himself at a lower level and indicates out his imperfections make himself appear to be similarly as human as whatever remains of us. This Humility that Wallace gives in the exposition, demonstrates the reader he wants to be somebody who he is not. He recognizes he is not flawless and has assembled the data he is going to introduce from his past individual encounters, mistakes, and considerations. Also, Wallace likewise utilizes logos to expand upon his contention. He utilizes a sensible way to deal with show individuals that they have a decision of what to look like at the world. He demonstrates that anyone can choose how to behave.

All in all, in this speech David Foster Wallace prove that the education he meant can not be teach in a university, it just can be learned by the person him/herself because that education is the way the person behave and think. David Foster Wallace wants the reader to rethink about the way they see other people and don’t judge a book by its cover. He wants us to be well-adjusted, so we can be successfully altered to see people by putting ourselves in their shoes. David’s speech was an influential speech that allows us to see people from their perspective, and also allows us to respect people’s conditions even if we don’t know what they are. I think the speech is great because of the meaning that it delivers for the reader and it also gives people a sense of awareness.
