Most of the people who appear most often and most gloriously in the history books are great conquerors and generals, while the people who really helped civilization forward are often never mentioned. We do not know who first set a broken leg, or launched a seaworthy boat, or calculated the length of the year, but we know all about the killers and destroyers. People think so much of them that on all the highest pillars in the great cities of the world you will find the figure of a conqueror or a general. 【小题1】.

It is possible they are, but they are not the most civilized. Animals fight, so do savages; so to be good at fighting is to be good in the way in which an animal or a savage is good, but it is not to be civilized. 【小题2】. People fight to settle quarrels. Fighting means killing, and civilized peoples ought to be able to find some ways of settling their disputes other than by seeing which side can kill off greater number of the other side, and then saying that the side which has killed most has won. 【小题3】. For that is what going to war means; it means saying that power is right.

This is what the story of mankind has on the whole been like. But we must not expect too much. After all, the race of men has only just started. From the point of view of evolution, human beings are very young indeed, babies of a few months old. Scientists assume that there has been life of some sort on the earth for about twelve hundred million years; but there have been men for only one million years, and there has been civilized men for about eight thousand years.

【小题4】. Taking man’s civilized past at about seven or eight hours, we may estimate his future at about one hundred thousand years. Thus mankind is only at the beginning of its whole a pretty beastly business, a business of fighting and killing. We must not expect even civilized peoples not to have done these things. All we can ask is that they will sometimes have done something else.

Teens Aren’t Getting Enough Sleep And Schools Are Partly to Blame

Most kids are severely sleep deprived, and early school starting times aren’t helping.

Across the country, only 17.7 percent of middle and high schools start classes after 8:30 a.m.. The average school start time for middle and high schools around the country is 8:03 a.m., according to a new analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The AAP advises that schools start after 8:30 to help teenagers get 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep a night — the amount the AAP says is ideal. Currently, less than a third of high school students sleep 8 hours a night, says the CDC analysis.

The analysis uses 2011–2012 information from the Department of Education to gather the start times of about 39,700 schools. Alaska has the latest average school start time at 8:33 a.m., while Louisiana has the earliest at 7:40 a.m.

Sleep-deprived teenagers are more likely to suffer from depression, use drugs, get low grades and be overweight. Even though schools often face obstacles when trying to delay school start times due to traffic and scheduling concerns, some have made progress recently.

After Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts delayed school start times in 2008 from 7:55 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., the private school saw a number of benefits. As the Huffington Post previously reported, the school’s 2014 viewbook noted that students earned higher grades; ate more breakfasts, visited the health center far less frequently; and performed better in athletics. Teachers reported that first-period discussion classes were uncharacteristically lively from the beginning bell.

Half of parents whose teens attend schools that start before 8:30 would support a later start time, according to a 2014 survey from the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.