BY SUSAN WARE

Pembroke Academy graduated 186 seniors during a ceremony on the school grounds on Saturday, June 16.

Senior class advisor Barbara Michaud gave a moving speech where she encouraged graduates to “get a life” by shunning material wealth and doing for others.

“If you don’t do good, doing well is not enough,” said Michaud.

Headmaster Michael Reardon promised the class that he would be brief and skip all of the graduation clichés. He encouraged them to look at Vietnam and the lessons we as a society learned there.

When he enlisted and was sent to Vietnam, he assumed that the administration that sent him there had done its homework.

“But who among us cannot be appalled that a mere 35 years after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, we are asking this sacrifice of another generation in a conflict about which our leaders – those, again, who, by definition, should know better – have not done the homework of answering the same questions that were not understood in Vietnam,” said Reardon.

He also told graduates the purpose of school was to cultivate their minds so they could compete in today’s global society. Quoting from author Thomas Friedman’s book,  “The World Is Flat,” Reardon said every year, India and China graduate millions more from college than the United States.

“In other words, there are a lot more people in the world prepared to steal your lunch money than there are planning to blow us up, and if you think the correct response to that is to despise them or bomb them, then you’re not doing your homework,” he said. “We – all of us – need to use our minds and remain diligent and alert about our world and our place in it.”