"Unquote" will be quite useless to them. Quite! The answers to their problems
are not to be found in the old writings, the records of a past which endlessly
repeated itself. They face conditions undreamed of in that past. The old thinking
is increasing our scoial deficit every day. ‘They will find it necessary to create
their own adaptations to a changed, and still continuously changing world.
Whenever civilizations of the past, qualified only by the thinking of their past,
reached such a critical point as this, to discover that they must think their way
daringly, novelly, into a changed intellectual, economic, or spiritual order, they
failed in the face of that challenge, and swiftly sank into decline. The thinking
of the past will not save us now. Somehow we must find fresh inspiration, to

face the new day which is upon us. Education confronts again the challenge to
which it has never in the past successfully responded,

You who bear the proud title of Educators - I congratulate you on your privi-
lege in days like these - the privilege of writing a new page in the history of
inspiring the minds of youth, to develop their own original genius, and originally
think their own way through their own problems. It is the privilege of responding
painfully and laboriously perhaps to a challenge which will search your very souls,
to their deepest foundations! But if you meet that challenge you can say at the

end, "I lived through the Great Days in Educationt"

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