Tradition
Fitting this classical standard of education all new students are required to recite the Ephebic Oath during the Founders' Day ceremony, celebrated each fall. Students recapitulate the oath at the commencement ceremony upon their graduation. The translation employed by the school is as follows:
- I shall never bring disgrace to my city, nor shall I ever desert my comrades in the ranks; but I, both alone and with my many comrades, shall fight for the ideals and sacred things of the city.
- I shall willingly pay heed to whoever renders judgment with wisdom and shall obey both the laws already established and whatever laws the people in their wisdom shall establish.
- I, alone and with my comrades, shall resist anyone who destroys the laws or disobeys them.
- I shall not leave my city any less but rather greater than I found it.
Read more about this topic: Townsend Harris High School
Famous quotes containing the word tradition:
“In former years it was said that at three o’clock in the afternoon all sober persons were rounded up and herded off the grounds, as undesirable. The tradition of insobriety is still carefully preserved.”
—For the State of Vermont, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The words of the Constitution ... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.”
—Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965)
“Barnard’s greatest war service ... was the continuance of full-scale instruction in the liberal arts ... It was Barnard’s responsibility to keep alive in the minds of young people the great liberal tradition of the past and the study of philosophy, of history, of Greek.”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)