Penn High School - Pennerian Yearbook (Greenville, PA)

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 OUR AIM Stated in terms of national service, the aim of the secondary or high school is to equip hoys and grls as fully as possible with the habits, insights, and ideals that will enable them to make America more true to its best traditions and its best hope. To strengthen what is most admirable in the American character and to add to it should be the goal toward which ail the activities arc pointed. Hence the best contribution which any school can offer is to enrich the understanding of what is required for right living together in a democracy, to encourage every disposition toward worthy initiative and cooperation and to provide all opportunity for the practice through which these habits and attitudes are most surely ingrained. By a fortunate circumstance, leading features in our national life, such as our ideals of liberty, and equality, and such traits as a distinct strain of chivalry, link themselves with the tendencies especially active in young people during their years in the senior high school. This is the time they crave freedom, self-reliance, a chance to show what they can do by themselves; then they arc notably conscious of a new personal worth, a quickened sense of justice, and a broadened desire to help their fellow beings. To give these promptings their best nurture, the school accomplishes two purposes that coincide: It makes for better America by helping pupils to make themselves better persons. Character is essentially a matter of action, the habitual performance of certain kinds of deeds rather than others; and the only genuine way of learning how to do these deeds is to do them. Nobody really understands what responsibility means until he has been intrusted with a task that has succeeded or has failed because of him. So with respect to “service,” “generosity” and all the possible terms of the moral vocabulary; any genuine comprehensions of them, requires practice in the deeds themselves first. Responsibility for the success or failure in all execution rests with those who not only obey the orders, but make them. This is true of more than the administration of school routine. A school magazine or year book, for instance, is in this sense a democratic institution to the extent that the students themselves initiate it and run it. It chooses its own policies and selects its own manager to carry them out. It is undemocratic and devoid of re- sponsibility when outside pressure, like that of the teachers is necessary to keep it up. The members of a democracy must be animated by the spirit of co-operation, a spirit more constructive than merely refraining from interference, the spirit of freely working together for the t ositive good of the whole. Initiative is en- couraged in order that better contributions may be offered to the common task. In short, in a democracy ethically motivated, everyone does his bit in behalf of worthy enterprise which lie has helj ed to will into existence. This conception is a special need in the America of today and tomorrow. The old rule of “each for himself without infringement” has proved a sadly unserviceable tool for our changed and changing social order. Not only has it encouraged an irresponsibility w hich opened the door w ide to dow nright political corruption; it has blinded us as a people to the shame of widespread poverty, disease, ignorance, vice and general inefficiency in huge masses of our population. Now it is too much to expect school life to exhibit the perfect working of a democracy. In the matter of freedom, for example, it would be unreasonable to permit inexperienced pupils in many instances children, to enjoy the liberties which only mature persons can manage. But the principles of initiative and co- operation are capable of being put into practice in many ways, indeed, that high school pupils can well employ. We want school life to be organized around the idea, not that each student is to do his utmost to get a better mark than his neighbor but that all are expected to make a free offering of their best to the progress of the class and the school as a whole, and through these, a larger com- munity. The point is the intelligent sharing by the pupils themselves in the re- sponsibilities of their own school community. For their period of life, the school is or should l»e the special field of their activities as ctizens. The proper perform- ance of these acuities now is the best preparation for the civic duties of the years to follow. PROF. H. A. KRALL Eleven

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