Why are we attached to BYU? We live in an area of the country where BYU is the rival, not the home team. Our house is still stuffed to the brim with college age youth who are attending a local community college and not a church school. So, why does our youngest need to know the Cougar Fight Song? I think its because BYU is part of what it means to be a Latter-day Saint. When our kids take a college class, they compare what is being taught with what they might expect to be taught at Brigham Young University. For our family, BYU is the measuring rod of a good education. Brigham Young, spoke prophetically to the early Utah pioneers, when he said:
"The Lord has chosen the poor of the world,--rich in faith--and the time will come when he will give the earth to his poor for an everlasting inheritance. I speak this for the comfort of my brethren and sisters who have been poor. They have come here, and what do we see? The youth, the middle-aged and the old improving in letters, in mechanism and in the arts and sciences. We bring them here to improve them, and if the Lord will bless us sufficiently, and the people will bless themselves, we will have a nation that understands all things pertaining to the earth that it is possible for man to grasp. Will this people be praiseworthy? Yes, and honored and honorable. Will they be looked to as examples? Yes; and it is the duty of the Latter-day Saints to live their religion so that all the world can say there is a pattern for us, not only in our business and worship, but in our knowledge of things that are, things that have been and of things that are yet to come, until the knowledge of Zion shall reach the uttermost parts of the earth, and the kings and great men shall say, "Let us go up to Zion and learn wisdom." (Young, Brigham. John A. Widtsoe, ed. Discourses of Brigham Young. Deseret Book. 1976 pg. 246).
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