Messages that provoke critical thinking--and telephone calls.

The three large signs outside Inglewood High School do not promote football games, bake sales or other extracurricular activities. Instead, they are filled with inspirational messages.

“Be Not Afraid of Growing Slowly,” said one recent message, “Be Afraid Only of Standing Still.”

The signs are the brainchild of Principal Lawrence Freeman, who came up with the idea in the 1950s when he was chairman of the reading department at Centennial High School in Compton.

“I think they add a lot more to the community than signs promoting football games,” Freeman said. “The schools aren’t doing enough to teach critical thinking. These signs provoke it.”

Passers-by seem to agree. Freeman says he receives frequent calls about the signs. Some people ask for copies of the proverbs. Others quibble about grammar and spelling. A number of the calls are from residents of other parts of the country who saw the signs while vacationing in the area.

The messages vary with Freeman’s mood. They range from the practical (“You’ve Got the Power--Register and Vote”) to the more abstract (“Experience Is a Jewel and It Had Need Be So, For It Is Often Purchased at an Infinite Rate”). Authors of past messages have included Mark Twain, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and Freeman himself.

With a pile of plastic letters at his feet and a 10-foot metal pole in his hands, maintenance worker Charles P. Williams turns Freeman’s ideas into reality.

It is not easy.

He must get all the words to fit on the sign’s five rows and must improvise with the letters, occasionally turning an M upside down when all of the W’s are gone. The crucial part comes when all of the letters are up and Williams takes a few steps back to proofread.

“When it’s real hot out here and you’re looking up in the sun, you misspell a whole lot,” Williams said last week during the installation of what he estimated was his 75th message. “I hear about it later when Mr. Freeman gets the calls.”

But the message he had just created was letter-perfect.

A maxim by Abraham Lincoln, it declared: “Always Bear in Mind That Your Own Resolution to Succeed Is More Important Than Any One Thing.”