Downingtown High School - Our Year Cuckoo Yearbook (Downingtown, PA)

Page 12 text:

The magnitude and scope of change today are so great that some people are thinking of the present era as a second great renaissance or at least a new age of enlightenment . In this new age we hear and see much of those old ideas of enlightenment which changed the Western World at the time of the American and French Revolutions. For example, the concepts of freedom, liberty, equality, brotherhood and rights were very popular long, long before our present decade and their implementation moved man one giant step down the long and difficult road of civilization. A much greater application of these ba-ic liberating ideas is probably upon us. We will, no doubt, come to know freedom, liberation and equality as no man has heretofore. However, as valuable and desirable as these may be, they, even if fully applied, fall short of providing the civilization that man requires if he is to survive. What man needs is to become truly human and to adopt and live by the great values and ethics that have given him a humanistic composition. Without human values as their foundation, freedom, liberty, equality and fraternity will not long endure and mankind may revert to bondage and the rule of tyranny. K