Pekin High School - Pekinian Yearbook (Pekin, IL)

Page 6 text:

FOREWORD But a few years more and the banner of civilization will have passed completely from the hands of the generation represented by our fathers and mothers into the hands of an oncoming generation of which we of the graduating class of 1934 are members. This banner represents a sacred trust and duty which we cannot evade and which we should have no desire to betray. The present year, together with the past four and the ones immediately in the future, in all probability will be looked upon by historians of the future as marking the greatest crisis to date in the history of the human race. They will be looked upon as dating the passing of one era and the beginning of a new one. Under this new order the individual who does not know thoroughly some one craft, art, science, profession or business, together with its relationship to human society, will be unable to compete with his or her more competent fellows. Individual efficiency will win greater worthwhile and self-satisfying rewards than ever before. These are our days of preparation for the responsibilities about to be transferred to us. If we permit ourselves to become discouraged by a period of unemployment for many, to the point of failing to fit ourselves to the highest degree attainable for the pursuit of some one vocation, as individuals, we will pay a greater price for our failure and inefficiency than was ever before paid as a penalty by the inefficient. That knowledge is power is almost axiomatic. It was true in the passing era. It will be still more true in this new one, which will make an imperative demand on each and every adult to know some one thing and know it well. Therefore, let us, after leaving our high school classrooms, keep ever in mind this need for specialized knowledge and, while we keep awake for the reception of truth in general, strive diligently to perfect ourselves in some one line of human knowledge, work, or activity, that we may live as self-supporting humans, express ourselves to an objective world, and play a worthy part in the new era now unfolding before our gaze.