Fulton High School - Fultonian Yearbook (Fulton, NY)

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Editorial 4+ When George Washington said, Knowledge is the surest basis of happi- ness, he referred to education as the basis of public happiness, but his statement is equally well applicable to our private lives, for without knowl- edge man would be little more than a brute. Happiness lies in achievement, so, in other words, knowledge is the tool which we must employ to fashion our happiness in the form of achievement. After four long years of striving to accumulate knowledge, it is but natural that we should regard ourselves as being well equipped with all the learning that is essential to happiness. However trite it may sound, it is none the less true, that man has never reached the limit in regard to the things which he should know. In the words of John Ruskin, Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close, then let every one of these short lives leave its sure record of . . . some goodly strength or knowledge gained for yourselves. Then, too, there is more than one type of knowledge. Besides mere technical learning acquired from books, there is the ability to get along. The world is full of people who are well equipped with special training of all kinds, but simply because they cannot make themselves compatible with their fellows, they are miserable failures in life. We should be constantly striving to acquire this ability during our post graduate course of Life. We are all familiar with the life of Robert Burns and the sad story of his failure. One of the main reasons for his pitiful collapse was that he could not analyze his own problems. In other words, Know thyself. This knowl- edge is highly important, and fortunate indeed are those of us who are able to see our own shortcomings and take steps to counteract them. One of the greatest problems of Washington's time was to aid through education the mass of illiterate people to become capable of intelligent self government. We are still striving towards that goal. Besides the actual training we have received in a particular branch of science, mathematics, or any other subject, we have also developed our reasoning power, we have been trained to get at the root of a situation, to weigh arguments, and to arrive at a conclusion by the process of logical reasoning. If we apply this knowledge to our own public and private lives, we shall have traveled far on the road toward the realization of the dreams of Washington and his colleagues when they founded this nation.

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SEIWIURS