Pickering College - Voyageur Yearbook (Newmarket, Ontario Canada)

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The Voyageur R. E. K. ROURKE, M.A. R. R. E. K. ROURKE was this year appointed a member of the Board of Management of Pickering College. Besides this distinction, he was made Associate Headmaster. The Voyageur would like to take this opportunity on behalf of the staff and students of the school to congratulate 'gBob on these new suc- cesses. That they were well earned goes without saying, that they were justified has already been proven. Mr. Rourke is spending the summer as Camp Director at Camp Mazinaw. There he will have on the staff along with him several of the senior students of this year as assistants. 25

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The Voyageur E have all received a heritage from the past. Our bodies and our minds, our knowledge and our skills, our comforts and our pleasures, these are a free gift to us. Our school community with all it possesses of faith and friendship, of love and loyalty, is equally our debt to our grand- parents. ln return for this it is surely our responsibility to decide on a worthy gift from ourselves to those who will follow us. It cannot be done in ways that are cheap, trivial, superficial or selfish, it can only be done as each of us loses his own individual life in something greater than himselffi HA Gift from Grandfather. HE Christmas season bids us look up and behold the stars still shining. Perhaps that is what is wrong with our generation-we have forgotten to look up. But the star of human decency is still shining, the star of Christian fellowship shines on throughout the whole world. Faith in God and faith in man is still possible. It is being proven today that no sacrifice is too great to preserve the sanctities of human existence. The good, the true and the beautiful-these things are eternal, immortal and changeless. The light of these stars will lead us to the beginning of a new and nobler life for ourselves and our fellowmenfi 'The Stars Still Shine. '4 OTHING in this world is ever achieved without struggle-without 'dust and heata. The value of that struggle, however, is determined by the ideal, the goal, the particular Grail to which we have committed ourselves. The great failure of education in our time has been that it did not provide young men with great convictions. This school has no business to exist unless it continues to send out a succession of graduates whose lives are on fire for some great causefl 'Wot Without Dust and Heatf, ITLER has mesmerized his young people with his beliefs. We can- not win the war, much less win the peace, unless we believe firmly, ardently and passionately in another kind of new order-4The New Jeru- salem', The Beloved Communitya, that our efforts can help to createf, Marching Orders for Youth. OME of you, my friends of the staff and of the student body are leaving. We will miss you, but you will be among our cloud of unseen wit- nesses. We know you will not let us down. And as we believe that life is good and that it can and will be better, we will not let you down. Remember 'they only are loyal to this school, who, departing, bear their added riches in trust for mankindfw So Great a Cloud of Witnesses. The above five quotations are from addresses by the Headmaster. 241

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The Voyageur Human Priorities An address delivered by Joseph Mcflulley, MA., Headmaster, Pickering College, Newmarket, Ontario. at the Annual Convention of the Associated High School Boards of the Province of Ontario, May 7, 1942. , T IS Nor WITHOUT sIcN1F1cANcE that the British Government, in the spring of 1940, announced that it would double the grants made to the Arts by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and the Pilgrim Trust. ln com- menting on this action, a Canadian editor recently wrote as follows: Gilt is common in war time to ignore the value revealed by art as something not then to be considered, but rather to be put aside until peace returns, for other more immediate and obvious values. Granted we are fighting' for our lives, yet is it not true that we are fighting for our souls? ls it not publicly announced by our leaders that we are at war, not alone to avoid murder at the hands of misled barbarians, but also that we may maintain our own ways freely. Surely it is worth while to use this freedom we still possess so that those fighting physically for our free mode of living may find, upon their return, no deterioration of the home for which they have sacrificed so much, but improvementf, This editorial comment on the action of the British Government stresses the fact that the war is more than a war for physical survival. At the annual meeting of the American Headmasters, Association this year, one of the speakers expressed a similar thought in this way,-uthere is no use fighting through and winning, then to find we have nothing left to savef, Do we really know what we are fighting for? 'CTO maintain our own ways freelyv? Yes, indeed. uFor democracyw? Yes, also indeed. But if democracy merely means our old way of life which we, the more or less privileged of our society, have found comfortable and pleasant, it is not enough. Our objective must be better than that. Our enemies have sensed that there must be some objective for the war which Hitler has described as Ma new order . He captured the minds of millions of German youth with his slogan. We, too, must visualize a new order better than we have ever had. It is only necessary to recall the plight, not of thousands, but of hun- dreds of thousands of young people in Canada during the decade 1929-39. lt is only necessary to remind you that the first grant by the Federal Gov- ernment under th-e Dominion-Provincial Youth Training Programme was for the expenditure of one million dollars to rehabilitate and train some 400,000 unemployed rural and urban young people. fThis seems a paltry sum when compared with our present expendituresj lt is only necessary to recall that in the United States, potentially one of the richest nations on earth, that approximately one-third of the people were living on an income under a minimum subsistence level. Our new order must certainly be better than this. But it must be a better new order than Hitleris. We cannot accept a society in which the basic principle is the diefication of the state and the ' 26