Salem High School - Quaker Yearbook (Salem, OH)

Page 19 text:

SENIORS The American educational system is designed to rake a six-year old.child, teach him the basic skills of writing, reading and math, and gradually add to this foundation for the next twelve years until that person emerges from his learning cocoon into a mature knowledgeable individual. This process and preparation for life is academically and socially intermingled with Chaucer, Shakespeare and Browning, Darwin and frogs, finger paintings, modern analysis, grade school assemblies, birthday parties, jelly sandwiches, Spanish verbs, wood shop, typing, football, basketball, snowballs, summer vacations, white prom dresses, pink-tipped carnations and graduation. Graduation is called commencement and everyone thinks it means the end. And in a way it is. It is the end of having co get up at six for Driver’s Ed. or waiting in.long cafeteria lines. It is the end of classes, homework and detention. It is a time for setting aside faded levis and dusty shoes and wearing long robes and mortarboards and marching precariously to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance and receiving a diploma in a blur of tears and f lashcubes. The annual speaker annually tells the audience that there has never been a class to compare with this year’s. He also states that commencement is not only an end to one part of life, but is a beginning to another. And he’s right. Commencement is a beginning. For many students it means obtaining employment, marching to the marines or marching down an aisle. For others it is scholarships, fellowships and college. Commencement is an announcement to a weary world that new hope is on the way.