By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Nearly 370 Princeton High School graduating seniors were urged Monday to accept new challenges in the next phase of their lives and told to break free of the ultra-competitive world they lived in the past four years.
Seniors sat together on the front lawn of the high school for a graduation ceremony that, unlike the past two years when bad weather moved things indoors, was outside on a late afternoon bathed in sunshine. Parents with cameras stood by the rope line to catch a glimpse of their sons and daughters walk onto the lawn to take their seats.
Dressed in their blue caps and gowns, seniors heard messages encouraging them and reminding them to be kind to their neighbors and tolerate people of different beliefs.
“As we leave high school behind, we are setting out on an adventure yet unwritten,” senior Isabelle Sohn said. “So let’s write something that we’ll be proud of.”
“You stand on the brink of uncharted adventure,” Superintendent Schools Stephen C. Cochrane said in using similar language. “You are preparing to create the magnum opus, the great work, of your lives.”
Mr. Cochrane did not offer students a Pollyanna of what awaits them.
“The world you are entering has awesome potential,” he continued. “But it is a planet plagued by violence and bigotry and an increasingly more fragile environment.”
“I think we can all agree that the present is imperfect,” Ms. Sohn said in pointing to poverty and suffering “all around us.”
“I hope that we remember that we can be a generation of change and that the Golden Rule is a good code to live by,” she said.
Yet students also were reminded about an episode, from the past school year, involving high students photographed playing an anti-Semitic beer drinking game. Senior Aidan Donahue recalled how his classmates and the school were put in the media spotlight after an “incident,” in his words.
“It rocked the entire community,” he said. “However, as a great man once said, a house divided cannot stand. Our class came together and stayed together as strong as ever after the scandal passed. The incident just showed everyone what we really were and that we were there for one another.”
With them eligible to vote in their first presidential election, Mr. Cochrane told the seniors they have a role to play in American democracy.
“Never forget, by some happy accident of birth, you are citizens of the freest country on the planet,” he said. “But those freedoms can’t exist if they are not exercised and those freedoms do not exist for the majority of your peers around the world.”
At a high school where students say they do not get enough sleep given all the demands they face, seniors made it through a place where one student leader said everything from arts and academics are competitive.
“Princeton High School is intense,” senior class president Jackson Miller said in describing how hard students worked.
“We’ve accomplished so much individually and collectively. But I hope in the next four years, we can take a step back to breathe and not agonize over matching and surpassing the achievements of everyone else and not question the legitimacy of every competition that we don’t win.”
In looking ahead, he urged them to go into summer and the start of college “without the anxiety of failure but rather the excitement of exploration and discovery.”
