A civil rights icon and fearless defender of children’s rights for most of her 75 years, Marian Wright Edelman did not make light of the challenges facing graduates as she addressed the School of Education Convocation May 16 at Walter Brown Arena. In a time when most teachers earn less in a year than some basketball players earn in a day, “it’s time for us to change our national morals and value system,” said Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, who referred to America’s millions of poor—and poorly educated—children as a “moral disgrace.”

At its 93rd Convocation, SED conferred 93 bachelor’s degrees, 339 master’s degrees, and 24 PhDs. Those degrees are a call to service, Edelman said, and “it is past time to have child-focused institutions that serve their children with love and high expectations.” In a time when the low priority given to early childhood education and health continues to result in illiteracy and a “cradle to prison” trend among the nation’s poorest, particularly people of color, “we should want for other children what we would want for our own,” she said. “And constituents in each of these areas ought to stop fighting each other and do what is right for children.”

A trailblazer who founded the Children’s Defense Fund in 1973 (and joked that a lot of people thought she’d “be out of business by now”), Edelman graduated from Spelman College, earned a law degree from Yale Law School, and was the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar. She began her legal career directing the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, Miss. Over the course of a distinguished career, she has received more than 100 honorary degrees and many awards, among them the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings, which include Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change; The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours; and The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation.

Edelman reminded the graduates that when it comes to teaching, compassion is a prerequisite. “A love for children opens up more paths for teachers than pedagogy theory,” she said to knowing murmurs of appreciation from the graduates. “If you don’t love children, you shouldn’t go into education.” And although she has long been on the front lines of the battle for equality in public schools and for access to quality early childhood education for children in poverty, she called on the graduates to address a trend, fueled largely by the internet, that reflects a value shift for children at all income levels. “I hope we won’t raise a generation of children with high IQs, but low compassion, a generation with mounds of disconnected information, but no moral context,” she said. “We don’t need more knowledge and less imagination, more worldliness and less awe and wonder. We need to raise children who care about, and have respect for, others.”

Urging the graduates to continue the work of fellow alumnus Martin Luther King (GRS’55, Hon.’59), Edelman noted that today one out of two black babies is born into poverty. And more than a century and a half after slavery was abolished in the United States, “if you are poor, you are in slavery,” she said, and referred to the number of blacks and Hispanics in prison as “the new American apartheid.”

“I live in Washington, D.C., and I’m amazed by the foolishness that goes on there,” she said, citing tax breaks for the richest Americans that could “lift all our children out of poverty. Which would you rather do?” To vigorous applause, she continued: “We don’t have a money problem in America. We have a profound values problem.”

Toward the end of her address, the noted activist offered six timeless lessons from an ancient source—the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark. First, don’t miss the boat: “The United States will miss out in the global world if we don’t improve education.” Second, rich or poor, we’re all in the same boat. Third, plan ahead: “It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark. We must have first-rate teachers who have high expectations for every child.” Fourth, don’t listen to critics and naysayers. Fifth, for safety’s sake, travel in pairs: “We need to rediscover the power of our collective mentality, and close the gap between our deed and our creed.” And finally: remember that the Ark was built by amateurs, the Titanic by experts.

“I hope all of you will be the indispensable ones to save the national soul,” Edelman told the graduates. “Children don’t have a voice. You have to be that voice.”