Wesley Central High School - Memories Yearbook (Fillmore, Saskatchewan Canada)

Page 8 text:

Many of you who are reauing this yearbook have alreaay spent several years of your lives in this school; others have just recently joined us; still others have by now left us to join the ever-growing numbers of those who can look back ana say with some aegree of truth and priae : The best years of my life were spent in Wesley Central High. Too often we tend to consiaer a school as merely a place and a time wherein and during which we prepare young people for life: in a sense we divorce school from real life, at least in our minds. Although I have during the past 8 years helped many a student write sections of your yearbook, this is the first time that I have an occasion to say officially how I feel about school ana if there is any real message that I would like to transmit to you and in particular to those whose schooling has not yet come to a close it is this: School Is Life; it is not merely a remote preparation for life. Live your school life fully but intelligently; live it with am.bition and restraint, open-m.indeaness ana fixed goals, honesty enu dignity. Expect a great deal of others, but be reedy to give much more: of your timie, your energy, your talents, yourself. Stress is oeing put these days on the aspect of change--rapid and drastic change — being experiencea by man in his world. Mav it never be forgotten that at the basis of all change there is an element of stability without which all woulu ena up as chaos. Personal and social qualities such as the above will always form the basis of a souno society ana will always raise an inuiviuual above the rest of the thi;;gs that surround him. Ana is this not the chief aim oi eaucation, to raise him above his surroundings? tC 2 --r Since Socrates philosophized on the nature of things related to the moral and social com.pulsions of man ' s nature; since Newton contemplated the scientific ana technological implications of the falling apple, man has persisted, some times haphazardly by a series of accidental incidences in the earlier stages, to an organized frontal assault in our later stages, on the stubborn though yielding forces of ignorance and illiteracy. This search for knowledge has brought to light some of the most amazing and exciting revelations in the field of technology and science as to open up whole new vistas in man ' s universe, and freeing him progressively from the menial drudge. The age of geographical discovery that was thought to have ended with Columbus is now born into a new age of interplanetary discovery with endless possibilities. A candle set in the darkness of the early beginnings relieved the blackness, but the surrounding shadows concealed intriguing, sometimes frightening, mysteries. The intense light of today ' s knowledge set in the darkness has thrown the shadows farther back and immensely enlarged the circle of light; but it has also increased the circle of darkness and now a multiplicity of intriguing shadows await our investigations into infinitude . So, like Columbus we say, press on into the shadows, into the unknown, for we may yet discover in the shadowy half-light, the elixir of life and bring such brilliance to bear as to allow the lurking evil no recourse but to flee in confusion from the blinding light. Fillmore Central School Board