“Now is the time to resist the pressures to only look at today, and to look instead at your future and where you’re going with your life.”

Do I Know Where I Want to Go? We might ask ourselves the question… Do I know where I want to go, what I want to be, what I want to do? As Lewis Carroll tells us in his well-known Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice was following a path through a forest in Wonderland when it divided in two directions. Standing irresolute, she inquired of the Cheshire cat, which had suddenly appeared in a nearby tree, which path she should take. “Where do you want to go?” asked the cat. “I don’t know,” said Alice. “Then,” said the cat, “it really doesn’t matter, does it?” Source: Thomas S. Monson

 Will you finish high school?  Will you go to college?  Will you go to a trade school?  Will you join the service? The path you chose today will determine your future…

Poverty Rates According to Education

Poverty Rates: Male vs. Female

Incarceration Rates by Educational Level

Source: American Diploma Project Network % Distribution of Jobs by Education Level 2001

Source: American Diploma Project Network % Distribution of Jobs by Education Level 1973

Education Matters!! The successes you will have in your professional careers will be due, in a large part, to the level of education or on other specialty training you receive after high school.

What impact do the choices you make now have on your future?

Integrity – making the right choices in life… the ability to last over time Definition in dictionary -- a firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values: INCORRUPTIBILITY Key Vandal Principle:

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. – Samuel Johnson, British author of 1700’s Can you think of a way in which knowledge might be used without integrity that might make that knowledge dangerous?

People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be—both in their youth and in adulthood—intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience. Alice Miller (20th century), German psychoanalyst and author Would you like to share with us a description of someone of integrity in your family?

I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. (Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird) written by Harper Lee, U.S. author. On the whole, does our society believe in the integrity of the individuals that make up juries? Does our society believe in the integrity of our judges?

“Live life on purpose.”