| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: of international hatred in the boys and girls who have to study them.
Nations do not like each other, never have liked each other; and it may
very well be that school textbooks help this inclination to dislike.
Certainly we know what contempt and hatred for other nations the Germans
have been sedulously taught in their schools, and how utterly they
believed their teaching. How much better and wiser for the whole world if
all the boys and girls in all the schools everywhere were henceforth to
be started in life with a just and true notion of all flags and the
peoples over whom they fly! The League of Nations might not then rest
upon the quicksand of distrust and antagonism which it rests upon today.
But it is our own school histories that are my present concern, and I
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Burning Daylight by Jack London: you Siwashes and Salmon-eaters. It's my night, I tell you-all--"
"A blame mangy night," Charley Bates interpolated.
"You're right, my son," Burning Daylight went on gaily.
"A mangy night, but it's MY night, you see. I'm the mangy old
he-wolf. Listen to me howl."
And howl he did, like a lone gray timber wolf, till the Virgin
thrust her pretty fingers in her ears and shivered. A minute
later she was whirled away in his arms to the dancing-floor,
where, along with the other three women and their partners, a
rollicking Virginia reel was soon in progress. Men and women
danced in moccasins, and the place was soon a-roar, Burning
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: heaven, or over the rail at the wavering reflection of the lamps,
like a man that was quite done with hope and would have
welcomed the asylum of the grave. And all at once, as I thus
stood, the City of Pekin flashed into my mind, racing her
thirteen knots for Honolulu, with the hated Trent--perhaps with
the mysterious Goddedaal--on board; and with the thought, the
blood leaped and careered through all my body. It seemed no
chase at all; it seemed we had no chance, as we lay there bound
to iron pillars, and fooling away the precious moments over tins
of beans. "Let them get there first!" I thought. "Let them! We
can't be long behind." And from that moment, I date myself a
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