East Brunswick High School - Emerald Yearbook (East Brunswick, NJ)

Page 31 text:

Much of the anger and abuse that seemed rampant at East Brunswick High School last year - indeed, across the nation — subsided this year. Not that we acted and thought in lock-step unity. The division was still there. But the edginess seemed to be passing, out of exhaustion, futility, apathy, and maybe even some understanding. Undoubtedly, President Nixon's efforts to unwind the war in Southeast Asia defused much of the anti-war protest. We did not see a repetition, for example, of last year's Moratorium. Sobered, too, by the heated controversy which accompanied last year's teachers' strike, the Board of Education and the East Brunswick Education Association reached an agreement on their new contract in a series of negotiations characterized by harmonious give-and-take. And in other areas of concern, the openness of the administration to suggestion and criticism kept the lid on the emotional kettle. The high school was not finally coming to its senses or returning to old-fashioned value. Rather, it was in the process of becoming something else. Some of the edge is out of the argument 27

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Page 32 text:

A curious world of contradiction One of the dominant themes of William Shakespeare's Macbeth is that nothing is but what is not. In some ways, that paradox was also EBHS. It was a strange world of contradiction. Because of the large numbers of people here, much of the ad- ministrative paperwork was rel- egated to the computer. It knew us by student number and our personalities were arrangements of holes punched in cards. But what saved high school from becoming a dehumanizing experience was the faculty who tried to treat us as individuals, who shared our joys and suc- cesses and who agonized with us in our sorrows and failings. 28