Central Manual Training High School - Record Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

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direction and guidance from without. It is therefore much to your credit that often in the face of most discouraging conditions you have so ably fulfilled the high duty imposed upon you by your fel- low citizens of a great community. I Such devotion to the public welfare can be accomplished only by personal sacrifice of time and energy and your own affairs. The trained judgment you have devoted to the affairs of our Alma Mater, is something for which we shall be still more grateful when we finally come to understand what such devotion really implies. It is a consideration of this kind, a sense of your high public spirit and unselfish intent that gives us reason to congratulate ourselves on having been under the guidance of men like yourselves. On behalf of the class, I wish to thank you for all you have done in the cause of public education and specifically, for your efforts in the interests of our Alma Mater. Farewell. I Gentlemen of the Faculty: Q For you the exercises of to-day are but the repetition of an event which no doubt has become a matter of course. For us it is the culmination of the most important, the formative period of our lives. It has been almost altogether through your unceasing efforts that we have arrived at this stage of our journeyg we know that the best part of your lives has been spent in preparation and in the acquisition of experience in order to help us build the house of our future on a rock and not on shift- ing sands of uncertain or merely tentative methods. In giving us the fruits of this preparation you have not been as usurers but you have acted generously, devotedly, without avarice and without stint. It is because of this fact that there exists on our part a valid obligation to you. We have not felt, as is often the case in other schools, that there exists a great gap between you and us. In our struggles and difficulties we have known you not as taskmasters whose inviolate rules we might not transgress, and whose criticism we regarded with sullen discomfort but rather have we come to regard you in light of faithful and thoughtful friends whose rigor, when it has existed, was altogether for our own good. - ' , 71

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It is moreover chiefly due to your sympathy and support as taxpayers of this commonwealth that the Manual Training High School idea has brought to such a standard of perfection the great system of our national public education. In maintaining such an attitude toward the public schools you have made it possible for us to obtain that carefully combined training of the 'hand and brain which ought to constitute one of the chief levers of an uplift in our lives. That schooling has widened our breadth of view-has, as it were, placed in our hands implements with which we may hope to cope successfully with the difficult problems in the struggle for existence. Whether we take up our position in larger schools of preparation or whether we plunge at once into the busy world of affairs, we shall doubtless discover that we have anticipated many of the vicissitudes that beset the paths of him who clambers forward. It is thus that there is begotten in us a conti- dence that our training will give us the ability to meet with competence whatever emergencies may confront us. On behalf of my classmates, therefore, I thank you and assure you that the sympathy and encouragement you have vouchsafed in the past a.nd your presence here to-day, have engen- dered within us a faith and an ambition to make the most of ourselves and by what measure of suc- cess we shall attain, to express to you how deeply we appreciate the interest you have taken in us. I bid you farewell, Gentlemen of the Committee on the Central Manual Training High School: Although in the course of the past three years we have perhaps been less intimately acquainted with you in a personal way than with the other directive agencies of our scholastic lifeg we have not failed to perceive your interest on our behalf. While we have never come into that close relationship which makes mutual comprehension less difficult, we feel and know that you by your unselfish efforts have done much to make possible the progress and enlarge the opportunities of our school career. . t. Nor has yours been altogether an easy task. The Central Manual Training High School of Philadelphia has deservedly earned its conspicuous success, but this success has been due in a measure to yourselves. A ca.use, however worthy or well constituted, cannot succeed without administrative T0

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Whatever little unpleasantnesses may have arisen in the course of our association together for a common purpose we hope are forgotten by you as we know they are by ourselves. Few schools are so fortunate as ours in the possession of men of special fitness and equipment. The consciousness of your personal integrity, your devotion to your daily duty, has been for us the most valuable result of our whole training. It is this example of the wholesome and unremitting routine of your labor that makes operative whatever ability may have developed in us as students- a reflection which brings to what I wish specifically to say-that the morale of our school unseen as it may be is nevertheless quite as valuable to us as the special knowledge that has been expended in our education as such. - I have said that there exists on our part a valid obligation to you. lt is this, that in our future career, we must show that we have not only benefited by the definite training received at your hands, a duty which naturally arises in the course of such association as ours, but we are under the further ob- ligation of developing in our own character the sterling qualities of faithful performance of public duty which exist in yours. We thank you gentlemen, and bid you farewell. Classmates : As it is inevitable that every phase of growth shall have its terms so it is in the nature of things that we to-day see the close of that association in which for three years our destinies have been so closely bound together. Each of us with a common motive has striven to develop whatever poten- tialities of intelligence and intellect we possess. At last, however. the ties that have bound us together must be severed. As we look from the vantage point of to-day and review the course of our previous three years of effort, we may be conscious that at times we have been engaged in a struggle that re- quired all of our native ability and all of our capacity for persistence to enable us to succeed. At the present moment the consciousness of that success is a cause of congratulation to us, an augury, let us feel sure, of future determination and an inspiration to strengthen our hands for whatever struggles may come. ' lo