Greenfield High School - Evergreen / Exponent Yearbook (Greenfield, MA)

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THE EXPONENT ness men went to work to make farming a pay¬ ing proposition like their factories. It was not an easy job, but it is just this application of busi¬ ness principles that farming most needs. The time was when the New England farmer was at a disadvantage, but the tide has turned. There is no longer any cheap land in the West. Transportation charges to the eastern markets are no longer low, as the rates are now standardized and based on distance. This gives a decided pref¬ erence to the farmers of the East. The western lands are losing their fertility, and commercial fertilization is already recognized as a necessity for good crops. Nevertheless, there are many i large and growing cities here in the East that must be fed. All these facts spell opportunity for New England, and that opportunity lies in one direction —agriculture. Classmates, we have reached our goal. Through four, long years we have seen hard work and good times together. Through four long years we have worked and planned for this climax of our school life. Tonight we part, but may we meet again in the future. A. LINCOLN DURKEE, ’24. CLASS DAY EXERCISES President’s Address of Welcome Parents, relatives and friends: In behalf of the Senior Class, I extend a wel¬ come to our Class Day exercises. This morning our historians will recount the marvelous achieve¬ ments in our past, and our prophets will unroll before you the glorious events of our future. If you think that those efforts are a little too hu¬ morous for such a serious occasion, our orators and song writers will show you that the Class of ’24 can be as dignified as our caps and gowns imply. With our welcome we extend to you, who have made it possible for us to be here, a promise that our motto, “Perseverance Conquers,’’ shall be our watchword in the years to come. LEONARD L. THOMPSpN, ’24 CLASS ORATION The Amazing Adventure of Popular Education Two thousand years ago today, in the midst of a grove of oaks in the isle of Britain, a very in¬ teresting graduation exercise was being held. In a small, rocky, open space, shaded to twilight by the arch of green overhead, stood a little circle of robed, white-haired men. Druids they were, seri¬ ously listening to their leader, a tall man of ma¬ jestic bearing, who was speaking earnestly to two middle-aged men in the center. These two com¬ prised the graduating class. Having finished their twenty-year course of training and study, they were now being received into the exclusive order of priests, or wise men. Here today is a graduating class of one hundred boys and girls, who have covered more ground in their four years than the two men had in them twenty. This is an example of the most astound¬ ing change which has ever taken place in the world. The Druids, representing the old order of things, looked upon education as a great evil, which was dangerous unless carefully restricted and managed. Under their system, only one per¬ son in five hundred ever got a spark of education. The very finest and most promising boys were chosen from the tribes, carefully trained and thught in the privacy and secrecy of the great forest in the learned arts and sciences. At the end of their course they were made priests, and came to have great authority in the tribes. In this age. there is no such careful selection of the best and rejection of the rest; we give any and all who want it all the education they can carry away with them. Now, this principle of universal free education is very new. In all ages, privileged characters have been educated, of course, but the idea of educating absolutely everybody was frowned at. Even as recently as 1671, Gov. Wm. Berkely of Virginia said: “Learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them. . . The Lord keep us from both.” The Puritans are to be blessed (or cursed, per¬ haps) for starting the free education iaey on its aniazing course. They educated only their beys, and did it because they thought a person could save his soul more efficiently for bei.ag able to

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4 THE EXPONENT every day, “0, God, help me to hold a high opin¬ ion of myself.” He realized how sacred truth, friendship and life are. He understood Tenny¬ son’s inscription, “Be loyal to the royal in thy¬ self.” Truly “Obedience to Law is Liberty.” But there can be no liberty without personal character, and character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza. Read it across, backward or forward, and it spells “Obedience to Law.” LESLIE G. ROSS, ’24. VALEDICTORY THE FUTURE OF NEW ENGLAND Four years ago. New England celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, and if the shades of her fathers were present, they must have smiled to see their descendants beginning again where they themselves first started—with the conquest of the soil. For the men of New England have a new vi¬ sion. It is a vision of abandoned farms reoccupied and cultivated, of great stretches of woodland cleared and made to bear crops, and of lowlands drained and converted into rich gardens. In short, it is a vision of New England’s rural life restored. During the first two centuries of her history. New England lived almost exclusively from the soil. Her towns were small and her industries crude and unimportant. The normal family life was on the farm. As the sons grew to manhood, they pushed westward to make new homes. This situation is not true today, however. During the past half-century the growth of industries and the concentration of people in large cities have gone on by leaps and bounds. New England is now one of the most thickly settled sections of the country, yet eighty per cent of her people are living in cities. Physical conditions do not account for this sit¬ uation. New England soil is as rich and fertile as any in the country. Figures compiled by the De¬ partment of Agriculture show that each acre un¬ der cultivation produces an average of twenty bushels of wheat, as against thirteen in the central West. Also, Massachusetts and Connecticut show the largest yield of corn per acre of any state in the Union. Our soil, since it is of the last gla¬ cial period, is least exhausted, and a well distrib¬ uted rainfall of forty-three inches takes care of irrigation cheaply. In spite of all these very fav¬ orable conditions however, the area under cultiva¬ tion in New England is steadily declining. Fur¬ thermore, most of her small towns are at a stand¬ still or are losing in population. On the other hand, the large cities are growing still larger. New England is already importing three quarters of her food, and day by day the gulf between pro¬ duction and consumption widens. There is a deep significance in these facts. The New England manufacturer and workingman are severely handicapped in competition with the Western industries, because the latter are located near the chief sources of food supply and so are better situated with respect to living costs. Up to now, our industries have managed to hold their own, but there is a trend against them which threatens to prove fatal. Take the matter of shoes, for instance. In 1900, practically the en¬ tire supply for the country was produced in New England. Since then and especially in the last two or three years, the shoe industries have been moving westward. This reduces their production costs by bringing them nearer the source of hides, and into a region of cheaper labor. As a result, the West is now supplying twenty-five per cent of the country’s shoes. The same situation exists in the cotton industry. The natural location for cotton mills would seem to be in the South, where the cotton is raised, yet New England has had a large share of these mills ever since the birth of the industry. But this will not be so for long. Several large concerns in New England have re¬ cently announced their removal to small southern cities, giving as their reasons: “cheaper living and less congested housing conditions for their help, as well as more favorable freight rates on mate¬ rial.” New England is reaching a critical point. Her rural life is rapidly disappearing, and her com¬ mercial status has a good start in the same di¬ rection. Pessimists predict that in ten years New England will be the playground of America. This situation has turned the attention of many back to our first occupation—farming. The trouble with the New England farmer, as a group of business men recently stated, is that he buys at retail and sells at wholesale, a system that would ruin any business. These same b isi- ness men asked a prominent farmer if he was making money from his cows. He replied that he was, but could give no figures to back up his an¬ swer. The business men proceeded to buy farms. They kept the same number of cows in the same way, but they kept books as well as cows. At the end of a year they were able to show the farmer that all hands were losing money, and just why this was so. The instance is typical. These busi-

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6 THE EXPONENT read the Good Book m the original. But they cc-rtaiiily started it all. From Massachusetts, this great reform was spread scatteringly through the colonies as far south as Pennsylvania before the Revolution. The new Northwest was given the free schools sys¬ tem as a birthright by the wise and farsighted (or perhaps, extravagant and insane) grants of land made by the Second Continental Congress. The West, therefore, has grown up with the new era, while the South just began to introduce public schools after the great Rebellion, when slavery was no longer a barrier. Now where are we? There are free schools everywhere, even in the smallest villages. Our schools and colleges do not wait for the people to come to them—they go to the people, and all the people have to do is to incline their ears and to absorb what is given them. The most wonderful thing of all, or, if you prefer, the most appalling, is the way the rest of the world is taking up t his new movement. The other Americas, North and South, Europe, Africa, Asia,—everywhere you go, outside the limits of utter savagery, you find to¬ day the free school and its amazing effects. This popular education is a right-about-face in the policies of an old, old world. It has brought radical changes in affairs, and none can say what the final outcome of it all will be, or even wheth¬ er it will be good or bad. However, we can al¬ ready distinguish some of its results. One very obvious result may be seen in coun¬ tries like India and China. The atmosphere of centuries has changed almost over-night. Students and leaders, many of them graduates of American colleges, are stimulating their countries to new life. Public schools are springing up, medical colleges have formed in the big cities, and the free education boom is on. A prominent Chinese says of his country, “The dormant giant is stir¬ ring; soon he will arise, shake himself, and then call his tormentors to account.” This is significant; education has always seemed to breed disorders and revolt. Again, the education of the masses means the passing of the ruling power from the few to the many. We may well question, as did Alexander Hamilton, the wisdom of the change. Are the masses fit to rule themselves? American tradi¬ tion holds that they are, but our government may at any time fall into the hands of educated, all¬ knowing morons, who would have been harmless hewers of wood and drawers of water under the old regime. It is not hard to believe that some¬ thing of this sort has already happened, judging by some of our recent legislation. But you can’t prevent things like that once you have taught your masses to read and write. Take this class as an example. We’re educated. We are just as good as anyone else, from our point of view. We are going to have a hand in running things bye and bye, and we’ll run them just as we see fit! Now, is it any wonder that the boat is often rocked? A fool with an education is forty times more danger¬ ous than a ditch-digging lunatic, and you will re¬ member that we educate fools and all, in our sys¬ tem. Since mass education, became so widespread, there have been great struggles going on between capital and labor. The laborers want to be on equal terms with their employers. There is no servile race today. Free education was all very well in old Athens, where there were slaves to keep the world running, but who is going to do the work today? Slavery is no longer fashionable. The younger generation, being educated to a cer¬ tain extent, feels itself above manual labor. In 1903, when the Mosely Commission came from England to study our school system, one of the Commissioners gave it as his opinion that our policy, if adopted in England, would prove her ruin. He noted that in this country a very great part of the ditch-digging and coal-heaving was done by recent immigrants who had never had a chance to learn, and he pictured England’s pre¬ dicament if her laboring class should be educated away from the pick and shovel. England has no immigration of laborers. Well, neither have we, for the new immigration bill which goes into effect in July cuts out Southern Europeans. Even if we had no such law, it is only a matter of a few years before education of the masses is firmly es¬ tablished in that region, ruining for all time that supply of workers. And this is what education has done, and is doing. Consider the people themselves. How are they affected by their education? They are taught to read and write, but not to think, and, as a result, are exposed to the propaganda of all sorts of fa¬ natics. As Pope said, “A little learning is a dan¬ gerous thing.” People thus educated, always ex¬ posed to the influence of the printed word, which is the most potent tool ever invented for the spread of evil, discontent and disorder, are bound to be misled, with unfortunate consequences. This movement is not all to the good. It is a fearful adventure, the full result of which cannot be imagined. The astounding rapidity of its com¬ ing is no more surprising than the host of new dif¬ ficulties that broke out soon after its arrival. We must go on, nevertheless, giving to the world this untested medicine, without knowing whether dt will act as a poison or a purge. It is impossible to turn back.