1980 School Magazine

With Christmas rapidly approaching we will celebrate the second great festival of the Christian year, with its same affirmation of light and life and joy and hope and love and challenge as stressed at Easter time. We are not merely looking back sentimentally at this season to an event in time with angels and wise men and shepherds and a baby in a stable, but we are celebrating the coming of God to us in human times, in our situationl to live our life with us and for us. ln his birth is our hope; He represents one who in- augurates the new humanity and in his own perfect humanity shows us the pattern of man as God meant man to be. Through his life of perfect obedience to the will of God he gives us hope in our situation despite the mess we make of our own lives, the lives of others and the life of the world we live in. lt is the baby of Bethlehem who is also the crucified Christ and the risen, ascended and glorified Lord who offers the whole human race a new chance, a new start, a new challenge at every end point to begin again. Soon after Christmas follows on New year and our world begins again in earnest - new experiences, new classes, new courses, new careers, new lives. One of the great Queenslanders of the early 20th century was Dr. E.W.H. Fowkes - barrister, musician, potitlcat leader and on his tombstone in Toowong Cemetery - a 'symbol of the finatity of death, there is ndtong insciiption - just his name and the one line - "On to the light and the splendour of the dawn', And this is the challenge which the end of the year and the celebration of the birth of Christ holds out toall of us - the challenge to personal renewal, to new adventure, to new experiences, to new achievement and to new determination "to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. " Let me first say that I am greatly honoured to have been invited 1o your 1979 Year 12 prize giving service and to have the opportunity to present prizes to the top students. It is always difficult on occasions such as this to find something worthwhile to say that is not too trite or sententious and has not been said before, for as you would know, adults, particularly school masters and mistresses are strongly disposed towards offering advice to the young whenever a suitable opportunity ari6es, and this leaves little that has not been sard by ttie end of the year. It seerns to me that newspapers, radio, television, in fact every part of the vast communications industry, of late has been disposed to offer advice to young $eople in some form or other, most of it, I regret to say, fairly fatuous. I have wondered a good deal about why tnis should be so, and why an industry which has been'fairly strongly devoted to the exploitation of youth in the pasi, should now appear to see its role so differently. I suspect that a reason could be that, as a community, we seem to be developing a strong sense of guiit, generated it is argued "by the repudiation of prev-ious certitudes about religion, sex, marriage, and the status of women in society", if I might quote irom one of the re- cent Boyer Lectures delivered by Mr. Robert Hawke. 4 Address by Mr. Max Howeil 8.A., B.Ed.(Metb), M.Ed.Admin. (U.N.E.), F.A.C.E.

When one adds to these causes of guilt, another cause that of continuing youth unemployment, which means that thousands who will leave schbol thrs year may not ever be employed in jobs which give them satisfaction or seltfulfilment, and indeed many may never be gainfully employed at all, it is understandable ihat our info-rmation media should be anxious to try to provide some panacea for the ills of our society by offering some form of gratuitous advice. Now it may well be the case that much of what the pro_ phets of doomsday say is true - ,,that new international alignments with changing balances of power have cast a cloud over hopes for peace, that economic ups and downs affect the buying power of every family, if,at in_ dustrial unrest is marked by wide-spreaci unempioyment, and that the rapidly increasing world popuiation is strain- ing for food resources, and that to ali of these major troubles there are added the irritations of traffic conges_ tion, pollution, strikes, fuel shortages, racist ind religious dissension, and the apparent perversity of people. " Most people admit now that the state of human beings on earth is lamentable and that there is no sense of is being part of a great society, but rather that we are toss- ed about like an enormous number of fragments, our actions are as ineffective as the gestures oipuppets. ln the words of Mr. Hawke - "Australia stands poised on the threshold of the 1980's more divided within itself, more uncertain of the future, and more prone to internal conflict than at any other period in its history." lf all this is true, then there would appear to be only two choices left for men and women today - eith-er to acquiesce in despair or to recognize thal some feet will tread the heights of improvement and to make sure that your feet are stepping in the right direction. Of course educated, thinking people would agree that to accept the choice to acquiesce in despair is no choice at all for those who would hope to retain a high self-image, and therefore all that is really left is to make use of t"he educational advantages we have, to face the problems squarely and do our best to solve them. The challenge to do th.at, by theway, is not yours alone, it is a challenge we all have to face and are facing daily. It might also be worthwhile to point out that because there is confusion and lack of certainty you are by no means a group of disadvantaged people or a lost genera_ tion as some believe. On the contrary, lbelieve lou are more fortunate by comparison with many past genera_ tions. You are not leaving school to enter the world of the 1930's when unemployment was far greater than it is to_ day, and in addition only about 5% of the population was educaled beyond Grade 10 so that the most they could hope for was a menial job for life. You are better off , I believe, than those school leavers of the early 1970's - unhappy, dissident, critically seif- destructive, who entered society with a cynical desire to tear down everything that was stable in society and to put nothing rn its place, and almost succeeded. They would have succeeded, I think, had it not been for th6 economic recession. No, I do not believe you are an unfortunate generation - in fact you are the best educated generaiion of young people in the history of this country, and your iuture education will be paid for by the community. Vou will not have to depend on a rare scholarship or a wealthy parent