BYU commencement: Graduates issued challenge (with multimedia)

Knowledge and skills are wonderful things to acquire, but all learning is not equal, fresh graduates of Brigham Young University heard at the Provo college's 133rd commencement Thursday.
    True higher learning is learning to love learning, and also to love serving, said David Bednar, a former BYU-Idaho president who now sits on the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
    "So facts are helpful and useful to know, but gospel truths are essential for us to live by if we are to become what our heavenly father wishes us to become," Bednar continued in his speech that was as much a sermon as a send-off address.
    To the Class of 2008, the church-owned BYU this week awards 3,944 bachelor's degrees, 488 master's degrees and 151 doctorates. About 30 percent of the graduates hail from Utah, their average age is 25, and nearly all are members of a religious community that values family and service to church.
    "Happily more than half of you are already married and I'm told the percentage will increase in the coming days," BYU President Cecil Samuelson said. Judging from the sounds of fidgeting children echoing around BYU's cavernous Marriott Center, many of the graduates are already parents.
    Bednar, a 1974 BYU alumnus who presided over Ricks College during its transition to BYU-Idaho, built his speech on the motto, "Enter to learn, go forth to serve," adding that students enter the Provo institution to learn to love learning.
    He likened the changing worlds the graduates will inhabit to the predicament of Nephi, the biblical character whom God ordered to build a ship, even though he lived in the inland city of Jerusalem.
    "He was commanded to build something he had never seen before to go to a place he had never been before," Bednar said. "We must use our abilities to the fullest, but our mortal best is never enough."