ORATIONS TO THE YOUNG

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3823, 19 October 1936, Page 7

ORATIONS TO THE YOUNG

PRIZE-GIVING ADDRESSES. “There is a tradition about school speech day addresses,” says the “Yorkshire Post.” The speaker is supposed always to be benevolent but not very fluent. Having spent half an hour handing out prizes, he feels it necessary to express sympathy for the boys who have not won a prize. “Further according to usual asumption of the satirists—he was himself not particularly distinguished at school for his intellectual achievements. Accordingly, his address takes the form of a rather laboured panegyric on the virtues of character. After all, he says or implies, the winning of prizes is not everything. Those who have won no prizes need not feel disheartened; they may have given valuable service to the school in other ways, and they will have plenty of opportunities in later life for earning distinction by patient merit. “‘I don’t mind telling you,” the speaker proceeds, ‘that while I was at school I never won a single prize. In fact’ —with a confiding smile— ‘I was not by any means a model scholar. I am afraid I gave the masters a good deal of trouble, one way and another. But I’ve got on fairly well in spite of it, and any success that has come my I owe very largely to what I learnt here at school. “ ‘The life here—and a thundering good life it is, be sure of that—taught me the value of team work and of keeping fit, I learnt to take orders and to play for my side, instead of for myself. I’ve never forgotten those lessons and I hope you won’t forget them. “ ‘They’re the most important lessons you can learn at school. Books are all very well, and’—with a bow towards the headmaster at his side on the dais—‘l should be the last to say you oughtn’t to work hard at your books while you’re here, but when you get out into life you’ll find that it’s not what you know that matters most, it’s what you do.”

“ ‘Learn to play the game and keep a straight bat and you won’t go far wrong. Remember, it’s playing the game that counts, not winning it . . . and so on.

“What the headmaster thinks of this advice is seldom known, but he might perhaps be excused for reflecting that prize-giving ceremonies are scarcely logical if scolastic success counts for so little in the end. And he might also feel that in many schools sufficient popular fame goes already to the athletes, and that on speech day, at least, the bpys with brains might be allowed a little credit.

“Yet even for the best-equipped speaker the task of addressing a speech day audience is peculiarly difficult. Advice given by the elderly to the young is proverbially unavailing, for if it is honest it is bound to be advice derived from experiences which, to the young, are still only a sound of words.

“Perhaps the best advice is to tell the young that they may as well learn what they can from their elders but that they will have to learn nearly everything for themselves, and to recommend them to go through life not recklessly but with courage and open eyes, remembering that the best lessons are often the hardest and that one lesson learnt is never more than a gateway to the next.”