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:
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes—our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“The tradition I cherish is the ideal this country was built upon, the concept of religious pluralism, of a plethora of opinions, of tolerance and not the jihad. Religious war, pooh. The war is between those who trust us to think and those who believe we must merely be led.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)