I happened to be leafing through 25 Beacon Street, a memoir written by Dana MacLean Greeley, a Unitarian Universalist minister and first president of the Unitarian Universalist Association after merger in 1961. I happened across the following passage, which delighted me the first time I read it, and still delights me today:

I dream every once in a while that I am still faced with taking high school graduation examinations, or that I haven’t completed by work. I did complete it and was graduated, but I had devoted myself probably too much to church work, and to athletics, and to being president of my high school class, and never was as brilliant in my studies as my brothers and sisters. One of our daughters once wrote in an autobiographical sketch for college admission (we didn’t see it until it came back) that her grades in school were not as good as they might have been because always when she was going to study her father said that there was a young people’s meeting at church, and that that was just as important. This seems to have been the theory in my own youth….

That seems to me to be a sound theory. Generally speaking, the young people I know who have spent a lot of time at church tend to be caring people who are more highly motivated than most to make the world a better place. Of course young people need good schooling, too — but seems to me it’s equally important to learn how to be a good person.