Near the end of his address, McCourt revealed the equation he had written on his classroom blackboard late in his teaching career: 'F' with an arrow pointing to 'Freedom'—from fear to freedom. It became his personal philosophy and the core of what he tried to teach his students. McCourt was speaking from the experience of a man who had grown up in the slums of Limerick, Ireland, steeped in Catholic dogma and crushing poverty, and who had spent the rest of his life systematically shedding the beliefs and fears that had been imposed on him. He urged graduates to undergo the same liberation—not from education or open discourse, but from the unexamined dogmas that constrain how we think and who we allow ourselves to become.