Brentwood College School - Brentonian Yearbook (Mill Bay, British Columbia Canada)

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GUEST SPEAKER ' S ADDRESS David R. W B.A., LL.D. When the Headmaster asked me a few weeks ago to speak on this occasion, I told him he must have flipped his wig and it was ridiculous to think that I could say anything that hadn ' t been said untold times before on other similar occasions. However, as you know, he is persistent and here I am. My hesitation in coming today was because I am dubious of the value of some outsider coming in and trying to give advice to a group of people most of whom he has never met and most of whom he will never see again. Having said this, however, I should, I suppose, point out that I am not a complete outsider. Two of my sons attended Brentwood, Bruce and Harry. Some of you here today may remember Harry who graduated two years ago. My daughter, Suzanne, has recently been an un- official member of the staff and has been putting some finishing touches to the work of the mathematics students among you. The only other connection with the school I can claim is that I have often played tennis against the Headmaster. Sometimes I play with him as a partner and I can tell you that he can just as easily play against you when he is your partner as when he is on the other side of the net. He does, however, hit a very hard ball, particu- larly when he hits it into the air after missing a shot. I believe his record is about 374 feet. Somebody once decreed that when you graduated from school you had to be spoken to, lectured, advised or counselled, or whatever, but it has now become a ritual sort-of-thing and you and I are part of the ritual; me for the second time because I can still recall fairly clearly my own matriculation and the person who spoke to us, and you for the first time but maybe not the last. In thinking about this today I cast my mind back to speech days I have attended at Brentwood in other years. I can tell you from my recollection and information who have been inflicted on you and your predecessors in past times. There has been a headmaster of another school; there has been a president of a university; there have been assorted university professors and in one year the Headmaster himself spoke after being introduced at some length by Mr. Bunch. I thought to myself that this was not a very well mixed bag of people to speak to graduates but then I recalled that one year there was a psychiatrist. I have often wondered if the graduating class he spoke to turned out any better or .worse than the ones the peda- gogues had spoken to. I ' m afraid that I remember nothing about what any of these estimable people said but I do remember that Mr. Bunch and the Headmaster, and also one of the university professors, said very well indeed those things I don ' t remember. You have been very lucky in having been able to attend this place. A few of you may have deserved such Williams, Esq., ,Q.C. good fortune but certainly not all of you. Somebody has had to spend a lot of money in bringing you here so that you could get the special brand of education and training that this institution provides so well. Even if that good luck is not apparent to you at the moment and even if you did nothing more with yourself .from now on, you will still have something of value which will remain with you. Also you are lucky because you are smarter than kids used to be. Smart perhaps isn ' t quite the right word for what I mean; the jargon phrase with it is perhaps the more appropriate one. When I look back on the state of my own maturity and that of my fellow school graduates and then look at today ' s crop there is an enormous difference, all in favour of your group. Mind you, you are still capable of doing pretty stupid things because you are not very old yet, but there is no doubt in my mind that yours and any other similar group around the province has more on the ball than in my day or even in the day of graduates of ten years ago. Now those are two of the good things that you have going for you. Maybe you can start building on and improving your luck, but your good luck may turn out to be bad luck if you don ' t look out. It is precisely the very factors which have made present-day graduates aware and mature that also present them with problems. Modern technology and methods of transportation and communi- cation (the Vietnam War in your front room) changing values and attitudes (how many of you voluntarily go to church on a regular basis?); the busy-ness of everything, the speed; the changing family patterns: the father of the household is no longer the autocrat of the breakfast table let alone the lunch or dinner table; the wide range of options and life-styles; you can take off and go almost anywhere you want and maybe even the government will pay for it. I mention rather quickly just a few examples of factors which have shaped you thus far and made you what you are, but it is precisely these factors and others that are going to make it tough for you to make a sensible decision about what you do now. After all if your choices are unlimited, maybe you ' ve got no choice. How do you choose something finite out of the infinite? If you can do anything you damn well please you ' re not likely to be much use to yourself or anybody else. Nowadays virtually anyone can go to university and study anything he likes if he wants to. I know Brentwood is university-oriented which is fair enough, but don ' t go to university because somebody ' s pushing you. If you think you ' re ready for it, try it out, but if you get fed up some- where along the way do something else for a while and go back later on. People and particularly students, don ' t all mature at the same rate and there is nothing wrong with splitting your attendance at university. The point is don ' t waste the taxpayers ' money by fooling around at univer-

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VALETE MR. F. MARTIN With the exception of one year Mr. Martin has been with the school since 1961 first of all as a Math and Physics teacher and latterly as a librarian. He was also secretary of the Old Boys ' Association. He leaves us to take up a position with Cedar Lodge School. 5

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sity of any other secondary institution that you may go to, like B.C.I.T. for instance, which, incidentally, is a very good place indeed. You can get good money from the government for not working and your range of options and choices about places to go, places to work, places to do things is almost unlimited, but don ' t be a drag on society. There is nothing worse than, a complete dropout; a guy who cuts loose from everything; totally irresponsible. If you are going to sit around on your butt be honest about it and do it on your own time and money and forget about handouts. There is an old phrase that is appropriate here: the cultivation of the intellect . Whatever you work at or do, whether you go to university of not, cultivate your intellect, and one of the best tools for doing so is what I may term a decent irreverence, or a healthy disrespect. I do not mean that you should be cynical but rather that you try to acquire a habit of mind and thought by which you will demand intelligent and reasonable persuasion before you accept a point of view or reach a conclusion. So how do you make a sensible decision about what to do now? Well, don ' t ask me, I don ' t know. I do know that in my day, which really wasn ' t so awfully long ago, choices were easier. You starved or were on relief, or if your parents had a bit of money or you worked, you could go to college and study from a relatively limited curriculum. You could go to vocational or technical school, and if you didn ' t do those things you went and got the first available job. You are living in a time of unusual contradictions which create their own tensions. We say the world is shrinking which it is, figuratively speaking; instant com- munication by satellite but peoples, nations, are becoming more and more insular and withdrawn and prepared to fight for it. Nations good old-fashioned nationalism has never been stronger, yet the world has never been smaller. You live in an age when the demand for food increases because of population growth, yet available land to produce it is diminishing. Not only that, the technology which might allow the demand to be satisfied brings in its train dangers to the environment, or to the ecosphere. Some few nations, Canada among them are very rich in supplies of food and resources, yet as you well know, many other nations are impoverished, famine-struck, lack food and resources, or one or the other, or both. Some people are so insensitive to this situation that even the leader of the N.D.P. party, whom one would expect to take an idealistic point of view, seriously advocates selling Canadian products cheap to us rich folks at home and expensive to the poor folks abroad. People talk incessantly of peace — peace at home, peace for everybody, peace in the world, and so on. Various sects, politicians, churches, all talking of it. Nothing wrong with talking of it, certainly, but society is still violent, men are still doing dreadful things to other people in the name of peace and brotherhood, and nations who call themselves peaceloving are still ex- ploding nuclear devices and bombs; even so eminent a person as Dr. Edward Teller recently advocated making nuclear bomb information freely available to anyone who wants it. Even if that doesn ' t happen it is almost inevit- able that somebody like the I.R.A. or the Palestinian guerillas will get hold of a nuclear bomb and blackmail the world. You live in an age of serious inflation and yet suffer equally serious unemployment. It was always thought unemployment was a deflationary factor but this is no longer valid. Mind you, many of the unemployed choose not to work at all rather than hold jobs they consider unpleasant or degrading. At Prince Rupert recently, I think it was, they had to shut down a sawmill because they couldn ' t find anyone to work in it. Increasingly Canadian employers are finding it hard to find workers in some categories. There is an increasing tendency by people to work only in the more settled areas of Canada and if they can ' t work there, not to work at all. The northern areas of Canada and of this province have largely no unemployment. Many people, including the Prime Minister, have questioned whether working in general is all that it is cracked up to be, and suggest that certain forms of inactivity are better for some people than activity. Perhaps the oddest contradiction in modern society is this: we want to do our own thing and be our own man, lead our own life, be independent and yet, increasingly, we decline to accept personal responsibility. We so often want to shift responsibility somewhere else — let someone else do it, I don ' t want to become involved, let the government do it - you know the sort of attitude I mean. We are increasingly letting government, particularly in this province, take away our power to make decisions and yet we say we want to be free. Free to be what, I might ask. Automatons? All these things I have mentioned are phenomena of the last 25 years or less. They are going to make life tough for you, maybe not next year but before too long. They are going to make it tough for you to keep your bearings and tough to make career decisions and personal choices. But I don ' t want to finish on a gloomy note. Frankly, I envy you, not only because you ' re young and I ' m old — or older — but because life in the next decades has to be exciting and challenging. The consequences of your failure to rise to these challenges may well be disastrous, but marvellous opportunities lie ahead of you. All I can say to you is good luck . 7