When you have personally lived enough history, the past regularly reverberates into your present. As I watch the tragedies and conflicts that have seemed to dominate our national conversation this summer, I am reminded of another summer. 

In September of 1968, I was beginning my senior year of high school. And as we entered the classroom that fall, there was a sense of foreboding about the future direction of the country ... and the world. The previous months had clearly revealed a social and political system under stress. The Vietnam War was in its second decade, and U.S. Military presence was at its peak. Martin Luther King had been murdered by a white supremacist, triggering a series of deadly riots across the country. Two months later, Robert Kennedy was killed by a man who resented his position on the Middle East. Two months after that, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and ended that country's movement toward independence. And in that same month, protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago turned bloody as police and demonstrators clashed.

What was very apparent as we began our senior year was how much the hot wind of frustration and hate was blowing across the country. Calls for calm were often met with cynicism. Anger was the default response. Yeats' poem The Second Coming seemed to capture the turbulence of the time.

It would be years before our society would be able to regain a semblance of balance. And I cannot help but believe that education played the critical role in restoring that balance by helping all of us to reimagine a world where dialogue replaced violence, where understanding replaced fear, and where respect replaced prejudice. In the end, those may have been the most important lessons that our teachers taught us that year ... or any year.

It seems to me that regardless of what year it may be or what challenges the year may present, educators remain our greatest bridge builders to the future.

Thank you for the crucial work you do. It has never been more important.