UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 UNWtKSITY of CALIFORNI> 
 
 AJNGELES 
 UbKAKY
 
 SCHOOL, COLLEGE 
 AND CHARACTER 
 
 By LeBaron Russell Briggs 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 rirtJcrsiDc press, Cambridge 
 1902 
 
 147238
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published November, igot
 
 Library 
 
 TO HARVARD COLLEGE 
 
 O thou whose chastening love hath taught 
 
 Our country's chosen youth, 
 Thou who hast led a nation's thought 
 
 In freedom and in truth, 
 Mother of learning and of grace, 
 We long to look upon thy face, 
 To gather all that now we deem 
 Thine own, into one face supreme 
 The nobly living, nobly dead, 
 The glorious sons that thou hast bred. 
 
 Where, leaping to the trumpet's call, 
 Men charge, to conquer or to fall, 
 
 And count not death a loss ; 
 Where youth, renouncing wealth and fame, 
 Follows, through pestilence and flame, 
 
 The Hero of the Cross, 
 Or renders, faithful to his trust, 
 The silent service of the just, 
 
 We know thy sons and thee.
 
 iv TO HARVARD COLLEGE 
 
 Thine is the burning heart of youth ; 
 Thine is the steadfast flame of 'years ; 
 Thine is the wisdom of the truth, 
 
 That falters not nor fears s 
 Thine is the strong and solemn glow, 
 Thine is the sweet transcendent grace, 
 Of her whose love, through weal or woe, 
 
 Lights her transfigured face. 
 Where hope is high and thought is free, 
 Where life is brave and death is true, 
 Where duty unrelenting leads 
 To tasks of pain forever new 
 The heart that triumphs while it bleeds, 
 
 Mother, thy face we see.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 OF the essays collected in this volume, 
 four have been printed in the "Atlantic 
 Monthly" and one has appeared in the 
 
 g Proceedings of two educational associa- 
 tions. The dedicatory verses have been 
 printed in the " Harvard Monthly." 
 The book does not profess unity or 
 
 p c completeness. It is not a full orchestra, 
 but a harp with two strings, which the 
 harper twangs as long as he thinks the 
 audience will put up with him. What- 
 
 ever is in it comes out of human expe- 
 
 6 
 
 rience ; and this is its justification, if it 
 has one. That it is not the work of an 
 "educator" may be inferred from the 
 inquiry of a distinguished superintend- 

 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 ent of schools who, after, reading " Some 
 Old-Fashioned Doubts about New-Fash- 
 ioned Education," asked with warmth 
 who the editor of the "Atlantic Monthly" 
 was and how he came to print such 
 nonsense. One thing is certain: he 
 who writes nonsense about education is 
 
 in excellent company. 
 
 L. B. R. BRIGGS. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 
 November,
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. FATHERS, MOTHERS, AND FRESHMEN . I 
 II. SOME OLD-FASHIONED DOUBTS ABOUT 
 
 NEW-FASHIONED EDUCATION . 33 
 
 III. COLLEGE HONOR . . . 65 
 
 IV. SOME ASPECTS OF GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 
 
 TRAINING . . . .91 
 
 V. THE TRANSITION FROM SCHOOL TO 
 
 COLLEGE . . . . . i7
 
 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, AND 
 CHARACTER 
 
 FATHERS, MOTHERS, AND FRESHMEN 
 
 BY virtue of the authority commit- 
 ted to me," says President Eliot 
 on Commencement Day, " I confer on 
 you the first degree in Arts ; and to 
 each of you I give a diploma which 
 admits you, as youth of promise, to the 
 fellowship of educated men." The col- 
 lege sends her alumni into the world 
 with nothing more than a warrant that 
 they are presentable intellectually. Yet 
 her unwritten and unspoken purpose is 
 not so much intellectual as moral ; and 
 her strongest hope is to stamp her gradu- 
 ates with an abiding character. A col- 
 lege stands for learning, for culture, and 
 for power ; in particular, it stands for the
 
 2 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 recognition of an aim higher than money- 
 getting. It is a place where our young 
 men shall see visions ; where even the 
 idlest and lowest man of all must catch 
 glimpses of ideals which, if he could see 
 them steadily, would transfigure life. 
 The Bachelor of Arts is seldom, on his 
 Commencement Day, a scholar either 
 polished or profound ; but he may be in 
 the full sense of the word a man. 
 
 Though the responsibility of the Alma 
 Mater for the manhood of her sons gets 
 little formal recognition, whoever loves 
 her feels it none the less, and knows that 
 her good name depends not so much on 
 her children's contributions to learning 
 as on their courtesy, their efficiency, their 
 integrity, and their courage. The college 
 herself, as represented by her governing 
 bodies, feels this deeply, in a general way, 
 but does not know and cannot find out 
 how far her responsibility reaches into 
 details. Intellectual discipline she pro- 
 fesses and must provide, subjects of
 
 AND CHARACTER 3 
 
 study old and new ; instructors that know 
 their subjects and can teach them : and 
 she is happy if she has money enough to 
 make these things sure. Thus beyond 
 what is spent for the chapel and for the 
 maintenance of decent order in the pre- 
 mises there can be little visible outlay for 
 the protection and the development of a 
 student's character. Nor can the forma- 
 tion of character, except as affected by 
 courses in ethics, be measured out and 
 paid for by the hour or by the job ; and 
 thus the college can do little more than 
 trust in the awakening of intellectual in- 
 terests to drive out the trivial and the 
 base, in the often unconscious influence 
 of men of character among its Faculty, 
 and in the habits and standards of con- 
 duct already acquired at school and at 
 home. Now and then a college teacher 
 rejects all responsibility outside of the 
 classroom. " My business," he says, " is 
 to teach men : if the students are not 
 men, I don't want them in my classes ;
 
 4 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 if they don't care to learn, let them go 
 their own way. What becomes of them 
 is no business of mine ; and if they have 
 to leave college, so much the better for 
 the college and for them. The first, 
 last, and only duty of a teacher in a uni- 
 versity is to advance the knowledge of 
 his subject ; he is false to his trust, if he 
 spends time and strength in patching up 
 worthless boys who have no place in an 
 institution of learning." 
 
 This doctrine, seldom enunciated by 
 men that have sons and happily never 
 lived down to, is the natural refuge of 
 professors who see the opposition between 
 the advancement of learning and concern 
 for their pupils' character, and who, with 
 the enthusiasm of the investigator and 
 the teacher, have time and strength for 
 nothing more. Nor is the professor the 
 only interested person that would shift 
 the responsibility. Those parents who 
 have turned their children over succes- 
 sively to the governess, the little boys'
 
 AND CHARACTER 5 
 
 school, and the big boys' school, turn 
 them over in time to the college. The 
 college, they admit, has its dangers ; yet 
 it is the only thing for a gentleman's 
 sons at a certain time in their lives, and 
 the risk must . be taken. The business 
 of the college they patronize is, like the 
 business of the schools they have patron- 
 ized, to develop, cultivate, and protect 
 their sons, whom, to put it in their own 
 language, they " confide " to the college 
 for that purpose. " I sent my boy to 
 college," writes the mother of a lazy 
 little Freshman that has come to grief, 
 "and I supposed he would be looked 
 out for." " Write me a good long letter 
 about my Darling," says another. " I 
 want my boy to be up and washed at 
 eight," says a careful father. " Please 
 send me every week an exact record of 
 my son's absences," a suspicious father 
 writes to the dean, and the dean won- 
 ders what would become of himself, his 
 stenographer, and his ostensible duties
 
 6 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 if all parents should ask for consideration 
 on this same scale. 
 
 " Some things are of that nature as to make 
 One's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache ; " 
 
 and often such appeals as I have cited, 
 though superficially amusing, belong to 
 the sad phenomena of the college world ; 
 for they imply parental distrust at the 
 very time when a youth, just entering 
 the larger life and the fiercer temptations 
 of early manhood, needs, beyond all other 
 human helps, a relation with father and 
 mother of long-tried and perfect trust. 
 They imply, also, parents' ignorance of 
 children's character. 
 
 To the dean of a large college, who 
 has most to do with students and their 
 parents in all academic sorrows, it soon 
 becomes clear that parents are account- 
 able for more undergraduate shortcom- 
 ings than they or their sons suspect, 
 and this after liberal allowance for faults 
 in the college and its officers. " I have
 
 AND CHARACTER 7 
 
 spent an hour today with Jones's father," 
 said a college president in a formidable 
 case of discipline. " I have conceived a 
 better opinion of the son after meeting 
 the father," and the experience is re- 
 peated year by year. Five minutes, or 
 two minutes, with a father or a mother 
 may reveal the chief secret of a young 
 man's failure or misconduct, and may 
 fill the heart of an administrative officer 
 with infinite compassion. " You say he 
 gambles," says a loud, swaggering father. 
 " Well, what of it ? Gentlemen always 
 play cards." " I told my boy," says a 
 father of a different stamp, " that I did 
 not myself believe in [what is commonly 
 called " vice "] ; but that if he went into 
 that sort of thing, he must not go off 
 with the crowd, but must do it quietly 
 in a gentlemanly way." 
 
 Hereditary and home influence less 
 palpable, but quite as pervasive and nearly 
 as demoralizing, is that of the trivially 
 biographic mother, who, while a dozen
 
 8 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 men are waiting at the dean's office door, 
 assures the dean that her son, now on 
 trial for his academic life, " was a lovely 
 baby," and who, so to speak, grows up 
 with him then and there, tracking him 
 step by step, with frequent counter- 
 marches, to his present station ; or of 
 the mother who insinuates that the father 
 (whose ambassador she is) has been less 
 competent and wise than she, and that 
 her son gets from the father's family 
 offensive traits which she hopes will be 
 kept under by the sterling merits that 
 he gets from her own ; or of the father 
 who is tickled by the reminiscences of 
 his own youth that are evoked when his 
 son is caught stealing a poor shopkeep- 
 er's sign ; or of the father who suggests 
 that the college should employ at his 
 expense a detective against his son ; or 
 of the father who, when his son is sus- 
 pended from the university, keeps him 
 in a neighboring city, at any cost and 
 with any risk and with any amount of
 
 AND CHARACTER 9 
 
 prevarication, rather than take him home 
 and let the neighbors suspect the truth ; 
 or of the father who at a crucial moment 
 in the life of a wayward son goes to Eu- 
 rope for pleasure (though, to do him 
 justice, he has been of little use at home) ; 
 or of the father who argues that his son's 
 love of drink cannot be hereditary, since 
 he himself had straightened out before 
 his son was born. 
 
 The best safeguard of a young man 
 in college better even than being in 
 love with the right kind of girl is a 
 perfectly open and affectionate relation 
 to both parents, or to the one parent or 
 guardian that represents both. In saying 
 this, I presuppose parents and guardians 
 of decent character, and capable of open 
 and affectionate relations. One of the 
 surprises in administrative life at college 
 is the underhand dealing of parents, not 
 merely with college officers, but with 
 their own sons. " Your son's case is just 
 where I cannot tell whether or no it will
 
 io SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 be wise to put him on probation," says 
 the dean to a well-educated and agreeable 
 father. " It will do him good," says the 
 father emphatically. "Then," says the 
 dean, " we will put him on ; " and the 
 father, as he takes his leave, observes, 
 " I shall give him to understand that it 
 was inevitable, that / did all / could 
 to prevent it." Now and then a father 
 writes to the dean for an opinion of a 
 son's work and character. The dean 
 would like to tell the son of the inquiry 
 and to show him the answer before send- 
 ing it, so that everything, favorable or 
 unfavorable, may be aboveboard ; but he 
 has, or thinks he has, the father's con- 
 fidence to keep. Accordingly he says 
 nothing to the student concerned, answers 
 the father straightforwardly, and learns 
 later that his letter, if unfavorable, has 
 passed from the father to the son without 
 comment, as if it had been a gratuitous 
 emanation from the dean's office. The 
 letter may be garbled. In answer to the
 
 AND CHARACTER n 
 
 inquiry of a distinguished man about his 
 ward, the dean of a college made clear, 
 first, that the young man had been in 
 danger of losing his degree, and next 
 that the danger was probably over. The 
 distinguished man had the unfavorable 
 part of the letter copied, omitted the fa- 
 vorable, and sent the partial copy to the 
 student. He omitted the dean's signa- 
 ture : but the letter itself showed whence 
 it came ; and it appeared to have been 
 written just after the dean had assured 
 the student of his belief that the degree 
 was safe. The young man was frank 
 enough and sensible enough in his per- 
 plexity to go straight to the dean ; but 
 the false position of the distinguished 
 man and the false position in which (to 
 some degree unwittingly) he would have 
 left the dean before the student are clear. 
 It is absolutely essential to successful 
 college government that executive offi- 
 cers should be square rather than " poli- 
 tic," and should be outspoken, so far as
 
 12 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 they can be without breaking anybody's 
 confidence. At best, it is scarcely possible 
 to make the younger students see that 
 the main purpose of a disciplinary officer 
 is not the detection of wrongdoers, by 
 fair means or by foul ; and it is quite im- 
 possible for such an officer to be above 
 suspicion in the eyes of students while 
 parents assume that he is either a partner 
 or a rival in disingenuous dealing. 
 
 Sometimes father and son combine to 
 keep a mother in ignorance; and fre- 
 quently that great principle of parental 
 relation that father or mother will for- 
 give all and will love in spite of all, but 
 will be most deeply wounded unless 
 trusted is not recognized by one par- 
 ent toward another, or by the son toward 
 either. In cases of almost total want of 
 previous acquaintance, cases of parents 
 who complain of vacation at boarding- 
 school because it leaves their children 
 on their hands, this is not to be wondered 
 at ; but in the everyday father, willing
 
 AND CHARACTER 13 
 
 to give his children the best of all he has, 
 a profound ignorance of his son's acts, 
 motives, and character must be rooted in 
 some deep mistake, not of heart, but of 
 judgment. That such ignorance exists 
 is plain : it attributes truth to the tricky, 
 sobriety to the vinous, and chastity to 
 the wanton. Its existence is further con- 
 firmed by the attitude of these misap- 
 prehended sons when no argument can 
 persuade them to be the first messengers, 
 to father or mother, of their own trans- 
 gression. " Your father must know this 
 from me ; but he has a right to know it 
 first from you. You say you cannot give 
 him pain ; but nothing will help him so 
 much in bearing the pain that must be 
 his as the knowledge that you yourself 
 can tell him all. Before I write to him 
 or see him, I will give you time ; and 
 I beg you to tell him : you cannot help 
 him more now than by going to him, or 
 hurt him more than by avoiding him. 
 This I know if I know anything : it is
 
 i 4 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 not mere theory ; it is based on what I 
 have seen of many fathers and of many 
 sons." Yet often the student, especially 
 the young student, still keeps clear of 
 his father as long as he can. 
 
 This want of filial courage at criti- 
 cal moments must be accounted for by 
 a false reticence in those early years 
 in which affectionate freedom between 
 father or mother and son must begin. 
 Unhappily it is fostered by literature. 
 Even Thackeray, whose total influence 
 is honest and clean, seems, when he 
 writes of college life, to have in mind 
 such general propositions as that young 
 men always run into debt and seldom 
 make all their debts known at home ; 
 that all normal young men live more or 
 less wantonly ; that only girls (whose in- 
 tellects are seldom strong) are pure in 
 heart and life, and that their purity is 
 a kind of innocence born of blindness 
 and of shelter from the world ; that no 
 mother knows the morbid unrest which
 
 AND CHARACTER 15 
 
 is stirring in her sweet-faced little boy. 
 Pendennis, Philip, the Poems all fur- 
 nish marked instances of Thackeray's 
 attitude toward the exuberant folly and 
 sin of young men ; and his notion of a 
 man's standard in things moral is re- 
 vealed by his remark that " no writer of 
 fiction among us has been permitted to 
 depict to his utmost power a man," since 
 the author of Tom Jones. 
 
 Thackeray is only too near the truth. 
 The earliest important cause of reticence 
 between parent and child, the longest 
 continued, the fiercest, and the most 
 morbidly silent temptation, the tempta- 
 tion most likely to scorch and blight a 
 whole life and the lives of those who 
 come after, the temptation most likely 
 to lead through passion to reckless self- 
 ishness, and through shame to reckless 
 lying, is the manifold temptation in the 
 mysterious relation of sex to sex. No 
 subject needs, for the health of our sons 
 and for the protection of our daughters,
 
 16 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 to be brought earlier out of the region 
 of alluring and forbidden exploration 
 into the light of wholesome truth out 
 of the category of the unspeakable into 
 the category of things which, though 
 talked of seldom, may be talked of freely 
 between father or mother and son. 
 Temptation, passion, will exist always ; 
 but temptation and passion which must 
 be nursed or suppressed in secret are 
 far more insidious, far less conquerable. 
 Moreover, temptation and passion, when 
 confided to a father or a mother by a 
 son who is struggling to do right, lose 
 half their danger: the strength of those 
 nearest and dearest buoys up our own ; 
 and the fear of confessing a sin a false 
 fear when once the sin is committed 
 may be wholesome as a safeguard. No 
 parent can begin to be in a frank relation 
 to his son if he has left that son to pick 
 up in the street and in the newspaper all 
 his knowledge of the laws to which he 
 owes his life ; yet, as things stand, this
 
 AND CHARACTER 17 
 
 most vital of all subjects is often the one 
 subject about which a young man shrinks 
 from talking with any but contempora- 
 ries as ignorant as himself, a subject kept 
 in the dark, except for coarse jokes at 
 the theatre or at convivial gatherings of 
 boys and men. 
 
 Almost equally important with an un- 
 derstanding between parent and son is 
 an understanding between every student 
 and at least one college officer. There 
 must be some one on the spot to whom 
 the student may talk freely and fully 
 about such perplexities as beset every 
 young man in a new life away from 
 home. Even a college-bred father is 
 college-bred in another generation, and 
 cannot know those local and temporal 
 characteristics of a college on the mas- 
 tery of which depends so large a measure 
 of the student's happiness. Besides, a 
 father may not be promptly accessible, 
 whereas every good college has at hand 
 many officers whose best satisfaction lies
 
 i8 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 in giving freely of their time and strength 
 to less experienced men that trust them. 
 Some confidences, no doubt, a college 
 officer cannot accept ; but even in a case 
 of grave wrongdoing, if the relation be- 
 tween him and the student is on both 
 sides clearly understood, a full confes- 
 sion, the only honorable course, is usu- 
 ally, in the long run, the only prudent 
 course also. At Harvard College the 
 relation between a Freshman and his 
 " adviser " is much what the Freshman 
 makes it; for the adviser feels an older 
 man's diffidence about forcing his friend- 
 ship on defenceless youth : but it may be 
 made of high and permanent value. So 
 may the relation between a student and 
 any worthy college teacher whom the 
 student, because he has seen in him some- 
 thing to inspire confidence, has chosen 
 for a counsellor. Here, too, a father inti- 
 mate with his son may help him to over- 
 come shyness, and to make use of that 
 disinterested friendship of older men
 
 AND CHARACTER 19 
 
 which is one of the best opportunities of 
 college life and is often thrown away. 
 
 By fostering these friendships and in- 
 fluences, by interesting himself in every 
 detail of a son's career, a father may do 
 much. A mother may often do more, 
 by establishing her son in the friendship 
 of good women. This is partly a mat- 
 ter of social influence, no doubt ; a poor 
 and ignorant woman a thousand miles 
 away may not see how she can effect it ; 
 may shrink from an appeal to the un- 
 known wives of unknown professors for 
 friendly greetings to her boy : but many 
 women whose sons are sent to a college 
 town know, or have friends that know, 
 or have friends who have friends that 
 know, good women there. The friend- 
 ship of good women is, as everybody 
 knows, the sweetest and most wholesome 
 corrective of loneliness and of wander- 
 ing desires. A boy of seventeen or 
 eighteen, far from home for the first 
 time, fresh from the society of mother
 
 20 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 and sisters and girl friends, may be ter- 
 ribly lonely. Near any college he will 
 find a number of foolish girls, easy of 
 acquaintance, proud to know a student, 
 and not fastidious about conventionali- 
 ties ; girls not vicious as yet, but on the 
 unseen road to vice ; girls whom he could 
 not comfortably introduce to his mother 
 and sisters, but who, merely as girls, are 
 of interest to him in the absence of social 
 and intellectual equals. The peril of 
 such friendships is as commonplace as 
 truth and as undying : reckless giddiness 
 on one side, reckless selfishness half dis- 
 guised by better names on the other, the 
 excitement of things known to be not 
 quite proper but not clearly recognized 
 as wrong, have led to one kind of misery 
 or another, so long as men have been 
 men and women women. Yet these 
 sorrows, toward which men move at first 
 with no semblance of passion, but with 
 mere lonely curiosity, may be forestalled. 
 Counsel of parents, too seldom given in
 
 AND CHARACTER 21 
 
 such matters, will do much ; access to 
 home life, to the friendship of motherly 
 mothers and of modest, sensible daugh- 
 ters, will do more. Shy and awkward 
 a Freshman may be, and ridiculously 
 afraid of speaking with women : yet the 
 shyer and the more awkward he is, the 
 lonelier he is the more in need of see- 
 ing the inside of a house and of a home ; 
 the more likely to remember, as what 
 made his first college year supportable, 
 some few days in which a good woman 
 who used to know his mother has opened 
 her doors to him as to a human being 
 and a friend. 
 
 After all, the most searching test of a 
 parent's relation to his son in college is 
 the son's own view of the purpose of his 
 college life. As I have said elsewhere, 
 " Many parents regard college as far less 
 serious in its demands than school or 
 business, as a place of delightful irrespon- 
 sibility, a sort of four years' breathing- 
 space wherein a youth may at once cul-
 
 22 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 tivate and disport himself before he is 
 condemned for life to hard labor." They 
 " like to see young people have a good 
 time ; " a little evasion, a little law-break- 
 ing, and a handful of wild oats mark in 
 their minds the youth of spirit. They 
 distinguish between outwitting the au- 
 thorities, whom they still regard as im- 
 personal or hostile, and outwitting other 
 less disinterested friends. " Boys will be 
 boys " is a cover, not merely for the 
 thoughtless exuberance of lively young 
 animals, but for selfishness, trickiness, 
 cruelty, and even vice. I wonder at the 
 rashness with which respectable men talk 
 of wild oats as a normal and on the whole 
 an attractive attribute of youth ; for the 
 wild oats theory of a young man's life, 
 when seen without its glamour, may 
 mean awful physical peril, disingenuous 
 relations with father and mother, dis- 
 honor to some girl, as yet perhaps un- 
 known, who is going to be his wife. 
 Yet parents, whether by precept or by
 
 AND CHARACTER 23 
 
 example or by mere personal ineffective- 
 ness or by dulness and neglect, encour- 
 age that very disingenuousness which is 
 exercised against themselves. Those 
 who have seen the unhappiness that 
 such disingenuousness brings can never 
 forget it. I have been begged by un- 
 dergraduates to keep students out of 
 a great Boston gambling-house, long 
 since closed. In that gambling-house 
 as Freshmen they had become bank- 
 rupt ; and for months almost for years 
 they had shifted and lied to keep 
 their bankruptcy unknown at home. 
 The crash of discovery had come, as it 
 always comes ; the air had cleared ; and 
 as Seniors they were unwilling to leave 
 college without at least an attempt to 
 save other Freshmen from doing and 
 from suffering what they had done and 
 suffered. I have seen sons before the 
 crash, and I have seen parents after it. 
 
 How much that is objectionable in 
 college life is the result of injudicious
 
 24 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 money allowances (whether princely or 
 niggardly), I have never determined. 
 Some students use large incomes as wisely 
 as their elders and more generously; 
 some pay the entire college expenses of 
 fellow students in need : others, no doubt, 
 have more money than is good for them ; 
 but it is hard to pick out that part of 
 their moral and academic disaster for 
 which wealth is responsible. 
 
 I may mention here that two-edged 
 argument so often urged by a father 
 when his son is to be dismissed from 
 college : " If you don't keep him here, 
 what shall I do with him? He is n't fit 
 for anything else ; he would do nothing 
 in a profession or in business." I cannot 
 say with some that it is no concern of 
 the college what is done with him ; for a 
 college, as I conceive it, has some inter- 
 est in the future of every boy that has 
 darkened its doors : but I can say that a 
 youth confessedly fit for nothing else is 
 not often good timber for an alumnus.
 
 AND CHARACTER 25 
 
 A college is not a home for incurables 
 or a limbo for the dull and inefficient. 
 Moreover, as a Western father observed, 
 " It does not pay to spend two thousand 
 dollars on a two-dollar boy." Though 
 a firm believer in college training as the 
 supreme intellectual privilege of youth, 
 I am convinced that the salvation of 
 some young men (for the practical pur- 
 poses of this present world) is in taking 
 them out of college and giving them 
 long and inevitable hours in some office 
 or factory. I do not mean that all success 
 in college belongs to the good scholars ; 
 for many a youth who stands low in his 
 classes gets incalculable benefit from his 
 college course. He may miss that im- 
 portant part of training which consists 
 in his doing the thing for which he is 
 booked ; but he does something for which 
 - through a natural mistake, if it is a 
 mistake he thinks he is booked : he 
 leads an active life, of subordination 
 here, of leadership there, of responsibility
 
 26 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 everywhere ; and he leads it in a com- 
 munity where learning and culture 
 abound, where ideals are noble, and 
 where courage and truth are rated high. 
 Such a young man, if he barely scrapes 
 through (provided he scrapes through 
 honestly), has wasted neither his father's 
 money nor his own time. Even the de- 
 sultory reader who contracts, at the ex- 
 pense of his studies, what has been called 
 "the library habit," may become the 
 glory of his Alma Mater. It is the weak- 
 kneed dawdler who ought to go, the 
 youth whose body and mind are wasting 
 away in bad hours and bad company, 
 and whose sense of truth grows dimmer 
 and dimmer in the smoke of his cigar- 
 ettes ; yet it is precisely this youth who, 
 through mere inertia, is hardest to move, 
 who seems glued to the university, whose 
 father is helpless before his future, and 
 whose relatives contend that, since he is 
 no man's enemy but his own, he should 
 be allowed to stay in college so long as
 
 AND CHARACTER 27 
 
 his father will pay his tuition fee, as 
 if a college were a public conveyance 
 wherein anybody that pays his fare may 
 abide " unless personally obnoxious," or 
 a hotel where anybody that pays enough 
 may lie in bed and have all the good 
 things sent up to him. No college 
 certainly no college with an elective sys- 
 tem, which presupposes a youth's inter- 
 est in his own intellectual welfare can 
 afford to keep such as he. Nor can he 
 afford to be kept. One of the first aims 
 of college life is increase of power : be 
 he scholar or athlete, the sound under- 
 graduate learns to meet difficulties; 
 "stumbling-blocks," in the words of an 
 admirable preacher, " become stepping- 
 stones." It is a short-sighted kindness 
 that keeps in college (with its priceless 
 opportunities for growth and its corre- 
 sponding opportunities for degeneration) 
 a youth who lies down in front of his 
 stumbling-blocks in the vague hope that 
 by and by the authorities will have them 
 carted away.
 
 28 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 The only substitute for the power that 
 surmounts obstacles is the enthusiasm 
 before which obstacles disappear ; and 
 sometimes a student who has never got 
 hold of his work finds on a sudden that 
 it has got hold of him. Here, I admit, 
 is the loafer's argument (or, rather, the 
 loafer's father's argument) for the loafer's 
 continuance at a seat of learning. In any 
 loafer may lurk the latent enthusiast: 
 no man's offering is so hopelessly non- 
 combustible that it never can be touched 
 by the fire from heaven ; and few places 
 are more exposed to the sparks than our 
 best colleges. Some new study (chosen, 
 it may be, as a " snap "), some magnetic 
 teacher, some classmate's sister, may, in 
 the twinkling of an eye, create and es- 
 tablish an object in a hitherto aimless 
 life, and an enthusiasm which makes light 
 of work, just as the call to arms has 
 transmuted many an idler into a man. 
 Some idlers whose regeneration is less 
 sudden are idlers at college chiefly be-
 
 AND CHARACTER 29 
 
 cause they have yet to adjust themselves 
 to an elective system, have yet to find 
 their niche in the intellectual life. Talk- 
 ing with a famous professor some years 
 ago about his wish to lower the re- 
 quirements for admission to college, I 
 expressed the fear that, with lowered 
 requirements, would come a throng of 
 idlers. "That," said he, with a para- 
 doxical wisdom for which I am not yet 
 ripe, but which I have at last begun to 
 understand, " That is precisely what I 
 should like to see. I should like to see 
 an increase in the number of these idle 
 persons ; for here are set before them 
 higher ideals than are set before them 
 elsewhere." " People talk of evil in col- 
 lege," says a graduate with business ex- 
 perience in New York. " I tell you, 
 college is a place of white purity when 
 compared with the New York business 
 world." In the withdrawal of the veriest 
 idler from the hope of the vision lies a 
 chance of injury; and this chance, small
 
 30 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 as it is, may fill the horizon of father or 
 mother. " Dismissal from college means 
 certain ruin." Hence these tears of strong 
 men, these " fits of the asterisks " in un- 
 disciplined women. Hence those varia- 
 tions in the father who first proclaims 
 that his son must stand near the head of 
 his class or go; next, when that son has 
 fallen short of the least that the college 
 demands, drags out every argument good 
 or bad for keeping him till the end, 
 and at last almost leaps for joy if he is 
 warranted auction-sound on Commence- 
 ment Day. Recognition of the possible 
 disaster in withdrawal may be blended, 
 in a parent's mind, with desire to avoid 
 personal mortification ; but it is a strong 
 motive for all that, and a worthy one. 
 It makes an administrative officer cau- 
 tious in action, and enables him to listen 
 with sympathy to pleading for which a 
 careless outsider might find no excuse. 
 
 Yet the chance is too small, and the 
 risk is too great. The shock of adversity 
 when the doors of the college close, the
 
 AND CHARACTER 31 
 
 immediate need of hard, low-paid work 
 in a cold world where there is no success 
 without industry, may be the one saving 
 thing after the failure of the academic 
 invitation to duty with no palpable rela- 
 tion of industry to success. Compulsory 
 labor with a definite object may at length 
 bring voluntary labor and that enjoyment 
 of work without which nobody who is 
 so fortunate as to work for his living 
 through most of his waking hours can be 
 efficient or happy ; and exclusion from 
 college is sometimes the awakening from 
 dull and selfish immaturity into respon- 
 sible manhood. No one is entitled to a 
 college education who does not earn the 
 right from day to day by strenuous or 
 by enthusiastic life ; college is for the 
 ablest and the best : yet, as some fathers 
 send their least efficient sons into the 
 ministry, as some men who have failed 
 in divers walks of life seek a refuge as 
 teachers of literature, so, and with results 
 almost as deplorable, some people send 
 their boys to college because nobody
 
 32 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 can see in those boys a single sign of 
 usefulness. 
 
 Wise fathers and mothers, when they 
 visit a college officer, are commonly con- 
 cerned with their sons' courses of study ; 
 their mission is rarely sorrowful. The 
 parents of troublesome students are not, 
 as a rule, wise. Yet some fathers and 
 mothers whose sons have gone wrong 
 stand out clearly in my mind as almost 
 everything that a parent should be, 
 asking no favors, seeing clearly and 
 promptly the distinction between the 
 honorable and the dishonorable, and the 
 distinction between the honorable and 
 the half honorable, holding the standard 
 high for their sons and for themselves in 
 every relation of life : women struggling 
 in silent loyalty to free their children from 
 the iniquity of the fathers, and men as 
 tender as women and as true as truth 
 itself. What they are to their sons we 
 can only guess ; to an administrative 
 officer, they are "as the shadow of a 
 great rock in a weary land."
 
 AND CHARACTER 33 
 
 II 
 
 SOME OLD-FASHIONED DOUBTS ABOUT 
 NEW-FASHIONED EDUCATION 
 
 DOUBTS " is my title, not "Views;" 
 and, as this title indicates, my 
 paper is the expression of a mood rather 
 than of a conviction. An observer of 
 educational methods is often bothered 
 by doubts as to the relative value of the 
 old educational product and of the new. 
 The new product, the educated man of 
 to-day, is in some measure the necessity 
 of the time. The demands of a special 
 calling require preparation so early and 
 so long that the all-round man that 
 invaluable species which has leavened 
 and civilized all society bids fair to 
 be soon as extinct as the dodo. No one 
 denies that the rare being who, in spite 
 of the elective principle, persists in get-
 
 34 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 ting a general education first and a spe- 
 cial one later, is a man of more power 
 than if he had been driven through a 
 general education by some other will 
 than his own ; yet with the kindergarten 
 at one end of our education and with 
 the elective system at the other, we see, 
 or seem to see, a falling off in the vigor 
 with which men attack distasteful but 
 useful things, a shrinking from the 
 old, resolute education. 
 
 The new education has made three 
 discoveries : 
 
 1 . Education should always recognize 
 the fitness of different minds for different 
 work. 
 
 2. The process of education need not 
 be, and should not be, forbidding. 
 
 3. In earlier systems of education, 
 natural science had not a fair place. 
 
 No wonder that the new education 
 seems to some men a proclamation of 
 freedom. The elective system, with its 
 branches and connections, is the natural
 
 AND CHARACTER 35 
 
 reaction from the unintelligently rigid 
 ignoring of mental difference in indi- 
 viduals. Its fundamental idea is practi- 
 cal, and at times inspiring. When there 
 are so many more things worth knowing 
 than anybody can master, to force every- 
 body through a limited number of de- 
 finite tasks before calling him educated, 
 to make him give years to studies in 
 which he may be a dunce, without a 
 glimpse (except stolen glimpses) of other 
 studies for which he may have peculiar 
 aptitude, seems flying in the face of Pro- 
 vidence. A classmate of mine earned 
 (so he says) three hundred dollars in 
 teaching a boy, who is now a distin- 
 guished physician, to spell " biscuit ; " 
 and another classmate taught a boy 
 Greek for three months, at the end of 
 which time the boy's knowledge of that 
 language was summed up in the words 
 " iota scrubscript." In the first of these 
 cases, not much may be said for forcing 
 spelling on the pupil; in the second,
 
 36 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 not much for forcing Greek. Again, 
 people are more interesting for being 
 different, for not being put through 
 the same mill. Uneducated country 
 people, for example, are far more inter- 
 esting, far more individual, than mea- 
 grely educated city people (such as most 
 of the salesmen in a large shop), or than 
 semi-educated school-teachers who are 
 graduates of some one inferior normal 
 school. We do not want men to be 
 alike. We cannot make them alike ; 
 why do we try? If we wish to raise 
 cranberries and beans, and own a peat 
 swamp and a sand hill, we give up the 
 swamp to the berries and the hill to 
 the beans, and make no effort to raise 
 both things in both kinds of soil. Why 
 not let each man do what nature says he 
 was made for *? Why beat his head on 
 a stone wall, a process that cannot 
 be good for his mind ? The old plan 
 of learning the whole Latin grammar by 
 heart was to some minds torture. Why
 
 AND CHARACTER 37 
 
 should the early exercise of our powers 
 and the training of those powers to higher 
 service be repellent or even austere ? 
 Life is hard enough without our wan- 
 tonly making it harder; let us suffer 
 our boys and girls to enjoy education. 
 Again, here is the earth we live on; 
 here are the birds and the flowers : why 
 shut out the study of these for Greek, 
 Latin, and mathematics ? Are the hu- 
 manities human ? Is mathematics either 
 so agreeable or so useful as botany or 
 zoology ? 
 
 Every one of these questions is eman- 
 cipatory ; but the emancipation may be 
 carried too far. Look, for example, at 
 the elective system. No persons lay 
 themselves open more recklessly to re- 
 ductio ad absurdum than advocates of 
 the elective system. Everybody believes 
 in the elective system at some stage 
 of education ; the question is where to 
 begin : yet extension after extension is 
 advocated on general grounds of liberty 
 
 147238
 
 38 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 (such liberty, by the way, as nobody has 
 in active life) ; and propositions are 
 brought forward which, if we accept 
 them, give the elective system no logi- 
 cal end. Down it goes, through college, 
 high school, and grammar school, till 
 not even the alphabet can stop it. 
 
 Doubt I. Are we sure that we do not 
 begin the elective system too early, or 
 that we shall not soon begin it too early ? 
 
 The attempt to make education less 
 forbidding has called forth various de- 
 vices, among them the method of teach- 
 ing children to read without teaching 
 them to spell ; and the kindergarten is 
 responsible for various attempts to make 
 children believe they are playing games 
 when they are, or should be, studying. 
 Here, for example, is an extract from a 
 book designed to teach children har- 
 mony, but entitled The Story of Major 
 C. and his Relatives : 
 
 " We will stop a moment and play
 
 AND CHARACTER 39 
 
 a game or two of scale with these flat 
 Majors, and then go on to the other fam- 
 ilies waiting for us. Major F and his 
 children play in just the same way as 
 his next-door neighbor, Major G, and 
 he also has one sign or mark ; but instead 
 of its being a sharp, it is a flat, and he 
 too has one dark-haired child, which he 
 calls B Flat. You see how easy it really 
 is to play a scale, if you only remem- 
 ber this rule about No. Four and No. 
 Eight, which is always the same in all 
 the Major families. 
 
 " All the other Majors excepting 
 Major C Flat live on the second floor, 
 and all call themselves flats ; so you may 
 begin anywhere on any of these black 
 keys and play a scale. Before you leave 
 these Majors, you must notice that Ma- 
 jor C Flat and Major B have to enter by 
 the same door, but when they are once 
 inside, each has a home and a family of 
 his own. 
 
 " There is a reason for this, and some
 
 40 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 day, when you are a little older, I hope 
 that I may explain it to you. 
 
 " If you will go to the piano, and 
 play a game of scale with Major F and 
 his children, you will probably find them 
 jumping and frisking about like little 
 kittens, but at a word from the Major 
 they take their places in the same way 
 as the other children, all Major sec- 
 onds apart, except this cuddling little 
 No. Four and No. Eight, who are al- 
 ways minors, whether in a Sharp or a 
 Flat family." 
 
 A modern text-book on the study of 
 language remarks that in walking out 
 we see various kinds of birds, spar- 
 rows, robins, hens, and what not ; and 
 that just as there are various kinds of 
 birds, so there are various kinds of 
 words, nouns, verbs, adjectives. I see 
 signs of a reaction from these debili- 
 tated methods, in particular from the 
 method which teaches children reading 
 without spelling ; but the effect of these 
 methods is with us still.
 
 AND CHARACTER 41 
 
 Doubt II. Are we sure that the en- 
 joyment which we wish to put into edu- 
 cation is sufficiently robust *? 
 
 I may teach a boy to saw wood by 
 suggesting that we play " Education in 
 Cuba." We may imagine ourselves a 
 committee for supplying the island with 
 as many teachers as possible, both men 
 and women. Oak sticks will furnish 
 men, and pine sticks women (the softer 
 sex) ; every sawing will make one more 
 teacher, and every sawing through a 
 knot a superintendent. This clever 
 scheme has at least the merit of an un- 
 disguised attempt to make a hard job less 
 disagreeable, and does not interfere with 
 the clear understanding on the boy's 
 part that he is sawing wood to help the 
 family ; just as Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, 
 when they called the four hems Europe, 
 Asia, Africa, and America, and talked 
 about each continent as they went along, 
 knew perfectly well that they were work-
 
 42 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 ing. No imaginative device, however 
 feeble, will take away the manliness of a 
 boy who knows that work is work, and 
 makes play of it when he honestly can ; 
 but nothing debilitates a boy more effec- 
 tively than the notion that teachers exist 
 for his amusement, and that if education 
 does not allure him so much the worse 
 for education. 
 
 As to natural science, I admit that it 
 had not in the old-fashioned programmes 
 a dignified place, such a place as would 
 be given to it by the Committee of Ten ; 
 yet natural science may not even now 
 have proved its equality with classics 
 and mathematics as a disciplinary sub- 
 ject for boys and girls. The Committee 
 of Ten maintained the proposition that 
 all studies are born free and equal, 
 possibly with an inkling that the new 
 studies are, so to speak, freer and more 
 equal than the old. Any one who clings 
 to the old studies as a better foundation 
 for training is told that his doctrine con-
 
 AND CHARACTER 43 
 
 tradicts the principles of the Committee 
 of Ten: but even this does not satisfy 
 him, since he may not be sure of the 
 basis for the committee's conclusions. 
 If the earth rests on an elephant, and the 
 elephant rests on a tortoise, the tortoise 
 is a good tortoise, but still we need to 
 know what the tortoise rests on. 
 
 Again, we are told and if I am not 
 mistaken, we are told by enthusiastic 
 advocates of new methods that the 
 object of education is not knowledge so 
 much as power ; in Greek, for example, 
 we no longer ask a boy to know three 
 books of the Iliad, " omitting the Cata- 
 logue of the Ships," we ask him to 
 translate Homer at sight: yet modern 
 doctrine fails to see, except in glimpses, 
 that no better way of gaining power has 
 yet been discovered than the overcoming 
 of difficulties. The fear old-fashioned 
 people have about new-fashioned educa- 
 tion is that too much depends on whim, 
 and that whim may be born of indolence.
 
 44 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 * Take the old system in its most mon- 
 strous form, take learning the Latin 
 grammar by heart before translating any 
 Latin author; nobody now defends a 
 practice so stupid: yet that wonderful 
 feat of memory strengthened many a 
 memory for other wonderful feats. The 
 boy who had mastered Andrews and 
 Stoddard knew the power of patient 
 effort, the strength of drudgery well done. 
 Through a natural reaction, memory is 
 underrated now. Education at the time 
 when memory is trained easiest and best 
 must be saved from the barrenness of 
 memory work and must be " enriched." 
 Even the multiplication table is threat- 
 ened with banishment. We leave the 
 strait and narrow way, and wobble all 
 over the flowery meadows. We are 
 held down to accuracy so little that it is 
 next to impossible to find a youth who 
 can copy a list of printed names without 
 misspelling. We have boys who can- 
 not spell, men who cannot spell, teachers
 
 AND CHARACTER 45 
 
 who cannot spell, teachers of English who 
 cannot spell, college professors who can- 
 not spell and who have a mean opinion 
 of spelling. 
 
 If there is one set of phrases more 
 threadbare than another, it is " along the 
 lines," " broader lines," " developing 
 along these lines," and the like ; and in 
 education I seem to hear, with weari- 
 some iteration, that children should be 
 taught " along the line of least resist- 
 ance." The theory is taking at first 
 sight, and looks eminently practical. In 
 dealing with lifeless things, such as ma- 
 chinery, it is the only sensible theory, 
 more work done by the machine, more 
 obstacles overcome by the contriver ; 
 but it is an extraordinarily inadequate 
 theory for the education of man. We 
 see parents (possibly we are parents) 
 who bring up children " along the lines 
 of least resistance ; " and we know what 
 the children are. Is it illogical to infer 
 that children taught at school "along
 
 46 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 the lines of least resistance " are intellec- 
 tually spoiled children, flabby of mind 
 and will? For any responsible work 
 we want men of character, not men 
 who from childhood up have been per- 
 sonally conducted and have had their 
 education warped to the indolence of 
 their minds. It is necessary to treat peo- 
 ple as individuals; but it does them a 
 world of good sometimes to treat a great 
 many of them together, and to let them 
 get used to it as best they may. The 
 first lesson of life, as Lowell reminds us, 
 is to burn our own smoke ; that is, not 
 to inflict on outsiders our personal sor- 
 rows and petty morbidnesses, not to keep 
 thinking of ourselves as "exceptional 
 cases." The sons of our wealthiest citi- 
 zens may be educated in either of two 
 ways : they may be sent to school, or 
 they may be turned over to governesses 
 and private tutors. Any one who has 
 observed them in college knows how 
 much better educated those are who 
 have gone to school, how the very
 
 AND CHARACTER 47 
 
 wealth which enables a parent to treat 
 his son as in all ways exceptional and to 
 give him the most costly and carefully 
 adjusted education which he can devise, 
 defeats its own end. With due allow- 
 ance for the occasional boy who is so 
 backward and so eccentric that he can 
 do nothing in a class, I believe that nine 
 out of ten of these pampered youths 
 would do better at a good school than 
 under a private tutor. The reason why 
 they would do better, the reason why 
 their playmates who have gone to school 
 do better, lies largely in the ignoring of 
 individual peculiarities, in the very 
 thing to prevent which they are kept 
 out of school. If it is true that God 
 made no two men alike, it is equally 
 true that He sends his rain on the just 
 and on the unjust, and rules His uni- 
 verse with inexorable laws. The world 
 cannot be our intimate friend, patient 
 with our eccentricities, smoothing our 
 paths. We must learn this just as we 
 learn not to pick up a live wire and not
 
 48 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 to fool with the buzz-saw. The world 
 is full of buzz-saws; and whether we 
 like them or not, they keep right on. 
 Here I may cite Mr. W. S. Gilbert : 
 
 TO THE TERRESTRIAL GLOBE 
 
 BY A MISERABLE WRETCH 
 
 Roll on, thou ball, roll on ! 
 
 Through -pathless realms of Space 
 
 Roll on ! 
 
 What, though I 'm in a sorry case ? 
 What, though I cannot meet my bills ? 
 What, though I suffer toothache's ills ? 
 What, though I swallow countless pills ? 
 Never you mind ! 
 Roll on ! 
 
 Roll on, thou ball, roll on ! 
 Through seas of inky air 
 
 Roll on ! 
 
 It 's true I 've got no shirts to wear ; 
 It 's true my butcher's bill is due ; 
 It 's true my prospects all look blue 
 But don't let that unsettle you ! 
 Never you mind ! 
 Roll on! 
 
 [It rolls on.
 
 AND CHARACTER 49 
 
 In practical life the job has to be done, 
 and the man must adapt himself to it or 
 lose it ; and in practical life everybody 
 but the trained man, the man who has 
 gained power through training, is going 
 to have a hard time. Education should 
 first and foremost train ; and training 
 has for its very substance the overcoming 
 of obstacles : furthermore, every specialty 
 is better mastered, better understood in 
 its relation to human life and achieve- 
 ment, by the man who has worked hard 
 in other subjects. I believe that the 
 epyoi/, or job, is the better for the irdp- 
 epyov, or side-job. Even now, one dif- 
 ference between a college and a polytech- 
 nic school is that the college provides a 
 basis of general culture for the specialist 
 to build on, whereas the polytechnic 
 school aims rather to put a man into a 
 self-supporting specialty with no " frills." 
 There is something the same difference 
 between a man of science and a mechanic. 
 
 " In his own early youth," says Dr.
 
 50 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 Martineau, as cited by the Boston Her- 
 ald, " education was thought of use more 
 to correct the weak side of one's nature 
 than to develop its strong side, and so 
 he gave double time to the studies he 
 disliked. This he admits to have been 
 too ascetic a rule, and yet preferable, on 
 the whole, to the emasculate extreme of 
 doing nothing but what one likes to do, 
 so prevalent to-day. Power to drudge 
 at distasteful tasks he considers the test 
 of faculty, the price of knowledge, and 
 the matter of duty, and that without this 
 the stuff is in no man that will make him 
 either the true scholar or the true Chris- 
 tian. At present the tendency is largely 
 the other way. To choose none but 
 studies agreeable and attractive from the 
 start is what young people are more and 
 more disposed to insist on. Virtually, 
 the student comes to the professor with 
 a bill of rights in his hands, and says, 
 4 Mind, you must not be dull, or I will 
 go to sleep ; you must attract me, or I
 
 AND CHARACTER 51 
 
 shall not get on an inch ; you must rivet 
 my attention, or my thoughts will wan- 
 der.' Very well, then, if such be your 
 mood, go to sleep, do not get on an inch, 
 and let your attention wander, is Dr. 
 Martineau's justly contemptuous feeling 
 at such sort of inanity. ' I warn you,' he 
 says, 4 that this enervated mood is the 
 canker of manly thought and action.' 
 Now there is something tonic and bra- 
 cing in this attitude of rebuff to the half- 
 weakly, half-insolent tone of so many of 
 the young people of to-day. If you want 
 us to be virtuous, heroic, learned, and 
 accomplished, they practically say to the 
 church, the school, the college, to their 
 parents, you will have to exert yourselves. 
 We want to gratify you, but will toler- 
 ate nothing dry, nothing hard, nothing 
 ascetic. The duty of the preacher or of 
 the professor is to waft us to Heaven or 
 Parnassus on gentle zephyrs ; otherwise 
 each must endure the pain of seeing us 
 conclude to go somewhere else."
 
 52 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 So far what I have said is chiefly the- 
 ory ; but the a priori reasoning is sup- 
 ported by painful signs, by crude spe- 
 cialists that one shudders to think of as 
 educated men (learned men doubtless, 
 but not educated men) ; by hundreds of 
 students who lack the very underpinning 
 of education, who are so far from know- 
 ing the first lesson of training namely, 
 that to be happy and successful they 
 must get interested in what they have 
 to do, and that doing it regularly and 
 earnestly means getting interested so 
 far from knowing this, that they sit in 
 front of a book helpless to effect any 
 useful transfer of the author's mind to 
 theirs. Brought up to feel that the teacher 
 must interest them, they have become 
 so reduced that they would like, as it 
 were, to lie in bed and have their studies 
 sent up to them. Unwittingly the new- 
 fashioned education encourages their in- 
 dolence. I remember talking some years 
 ago with a student who was fond of
 
 AND CHARACTER 53 
 
 chemistry, but whose habits of work, as 
 I saw them in another subject, were 
 shiftless and slack. I tried to show him 
 the necessity, even for his chemistry, of 
 habitual accuracy in thought and ex- 
 pression ; and at last I told him that, 
 though the position he took might do 
 for a genius, it would not do for ordinary 
 men like himself and me. He replied 
 that he had rather be anything than an 
 ordinary man. What he is now, I do 
 not know. Another student refused to 
 take pains with his English because, as 
 he said, he had been brought up among 
 people who spoke English well " by in- 
 tuition." This intuitive English is often 
 picturesque and winning ; but it is sel- 
 dom capable of difficult work. 
 
 How many boys know what will best 
 develop their minds ? How many par- 
 ents, even if themselves educated, can 
 resist the combined pressure of boys 
 and plausible new-fashioned educators ? 
 Even the youth who wants the old pre-
 
 54 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 scribed curriculum cannot get it ; he 
 may choose the old studies, but not the 
 old instruction. Instruction under an 
 elective system is aimed at the specialist. 
 In elective mathematics, for example, 
 the non-mathematical student who takes 
 the study for self-discipline finds the 
 instruction too high for him; indeed, 
 he finds no encouragement for electing 
 mathematics at all. The new system 
 holds that the study should follow the 
 bent of the mind rather than that the 
 mind should bend itself to follow the 
 study. As a result, prescribed work, so 
 far as it exists under an elective system, 
 is regarded by many students as folly, 
 and if difficult, as persecution. When 
 the writing of forensics argumentative 
 work which involved hard thinking 
 was prescribed in Harvard College, no 
 work in the college was done less hon- 
 estly. Students would often defend them- 
 selves for cheating in this study because 
 it was " really too hard for a prescribed
 
 AND CHARACTER 55 
 
 subject." I know I am using a two- 
 edged argument : does it show how the 
 new system weakens mental fibre, or 
 how the old system encourages dishon- 
 esty 1 ? Different men will give different 
 answers. As to forensics, we may con- 
 trast with the spirit of the students the 
 spirit of the man who did most for the 
 study. A trained instructor, whose pe- 
 culiar interest lay elsewhere, was asked to 
 undertake the difficult and repellent task 
 of teaching prescribed argumentative 
 composition. What resulted is what al- 
 ways results when a trained man makes 
 up his mind to do a piece of work as 
 well as he can, genuine enthusiasm for 
 the subject ; and the instructor who ex- 
 pected to feel only a forced interest in 
 argumentative composition has become 
 an authority in it. 
 
 I know that often the idler bestirs 
 himself, fired by enthusiasm in his chosen 
 subject ; and that then he sees the mean- 
 ing, and even the beauty, of drudgery : but
 
 56 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 the drudgery is less easy, because he has 
 never before learned to drudge with en- 
 thusiasm, or even with the fidelity which 
 may in time beget enthusiasm ; because 
 he never trained his memory in child- 
 hood, when memory is trained best ; be- 
 cause he has always, from kindergarten 
 to college, been treated deferentially; 
 because he has transferred the elective 
 system from studies to life. " I see in 
 the new system," said a father the other 
 day, " nothing to establish the habit of 
 application the most valuable habit of 
 all." " There is nothing," said the teacher 
 with whom he was talking, " unless the 
 student gets interested in some study." 
 " Yes," said the father, " he may strike 
 something that interests him; but it 
 seems dreadfully unscientific to leave it 
 all to chance." 
 
 Doubt III, related to Doubt I. Do 
 we not see in the men educated accord- 
 ing to modern methods such a weakness 
 in attacking difficulties as may indicate
 
 AND CHARACTER 57 
 
 that we should be slow to let the sec- 
 ondary school march in the path of the 
 college and the grammar school follow 
 close behind *? 
 
 Another doubt about new-fashioned 
 education I have been glad to see ex- 
 pressed in recent numbers of The Nation. 
 It concerns what is expected of teachers ; 
 it concerns the abnormal value set on 
 text-books, and, I may add, the abnor- 
 mal value set by some institutions on 
 the higher degrees. We frequently hear 
 it said of a teacher that he has taught 
 for many years, but has " produced " 
 nothing ; and this often means that he 
 has never written a text-book. I would 
 not undervalue text-books as a practical 
 result of experience in teaching : but the 
 teacher's first business is to teach, 
 writing is a secondary affair; and, as a 
 rule, the best part of a teacher's produc- 
 tion is what he produces in the minds 
 and in the characters of his pupils. Few
 
 58 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 of the great teachers, whether of schools 
 or of colleges, are remembered through 
 their text-books. It was not text-books 
 that gave Dr. Arnold of Rugby his hold 
 on English boys. The late Dr. Henry 
 Coit had, we hear, marvellous insight into 
 a boy's character, and marvellous power 
 over every boy who was near him; but 
 we never hear of his text-books, if, in- 
 deed, he wrote any. Nor is it through 
 text-books that we know Mr. Amen of 
 Exeter and Mr. Peabody of Groton. 
 The new education lays so much stress 
 on writing and on investigation, and on 
 theses as the result of investigation, and 
 on originality in these theses, that it 
 seems sometimes to encourage a young 
 man in maintaining a proposition of 
 which the sole value lies in its novelty 
 (no one having been unwise enough to 
 maintain it before), and in defending that 
 proposition by a Germanized thesis, 
 
 " Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen 
 ademptum."
 
 AND CHARACTER 59 
 
 Such theses, I suspect, have more than 
 once been accepted for higher degrees ; 
 yet higher degrees won through them 
 leave the winner farther from the best 
 qualities of a teacher, remote from men 
 and still more remote from boys. It 
 was a relief the other day to hear a head- 
 master say, " I am looking for an under- 
 teacher. I want first a man, and next a 
 man to teach." It is a relief, also, to 
 see the marked success of several school- 
 masters whose preparation for teaching 
 consists first in manliness, and secondly 
 in only a moderate amount of learning. 
 That a teacher should know his subject 
 is obvious: nothing, not even new-fash- 
 ioned instruction in methods of teaching, 
 will make up for ignorance of the sub- 
 ject itself: but the man of intelligence 
 and self-sacrifice who bends his energy 
 to teaching boys will soon get enough 
 scholarship for the purpose ; whereas no 
 amount of scholarship can make up for 
 the want of intelligence and self-sacrifice.
 
 60 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 Doubt IV. While fitting the study 
 to the boy, have we been unfitting the 
 teacher for him ? 
 
 Obviously the new education throws 
 a tremendous responsibility on teachers. 
 We see why it should ; and all of us 
 who are familiar with the inner working 
 of a modern school or a modern college 
 know that it does. How is it training 
 the new generation for this responsibil- 
 ity ? In some ways admirably. It tries 
 to show that teaching is not a haphazard 
 affair, but a subject for investigation and 
 study; it tries to show how libraries 
 should be used, and how original inves- 
 tigation should be conducted : but old- 
 fashioned people doubt whether it gives 
 due weight to the maxim that Professor 
 Bowen used to repeat so often, "The 
 foundation must be stronger than the 
 superstructure." They doubt whether 
 teachers, themselves educated " along 
 the lines of least resistance," can stand
 
 AND CHARACTER 61 
 
 the strain of modern teaching. As a 
 relief from wooden teaching and wooden 
 learning, the new education deserves all 
 gratitude. No one is so conservative as 
 to prefer a dull teacher to an interesting 
 one because the dull teacher offers more 
 obstacles to learning. In this matter, as 
 in all other matters of education, the 
 question is not whether we should be 
 altogether old-fashioned or altogether 
 new-fashioned (we may be "alike fan- 
 tastic if too new or old " ) : the question 
 is where the old should stop and the 
 new begin. 
 
 Doubt V. In emancipation from the 
 evils of the old system, may we not be 
 rushing into another servitude almost or 
 quite as dangerous as the first *? 
 
 I have often used the word " training." 
 Now what is training, and what is the 
 peculiar characteristic of the trained 
 mind ? Training is the discipline that 
 teaches a man to set labor above whim ;
 
 62 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 to develop the less promising parts of his 
 mind as well as the more promising; to 
 make five talents ten and two five ; to 
 see that in his specialty he shall work 
 better and enjoy more for knowing some- 
 thing outside of his specialty ; to recog- 
 nize the connection between present toil 
 and future attainment, so that the hope 
 of future attainment creates pleasure in 
 present toil; to understand that nothing 
 can be mastered without drudgery, and 
 that drudgery in preparation for service 
 is not only respectable but beautiful; to 
 be interested in every study, no matter 
 how forbidding; to work steadily and 
 resolutely until, through long practice, 
 
 and, it may be, after many failures, 
 
 he is trusted to do the right thing, or 
 something near it, mechanically, just as 
 the trained pianist instinctively touches 
 the right note. Training is all this and 
 more. Why should we be content to 
 let so many of our boys get their best 
 discipline not from study but from ath- 
 letics ?
 
 AND CHARACTER 63 
 
 " But the new education," you say, 
 "is in some ways more general than the 
 old. From the start it opens to eager 
 eyes all the beautiful world of science ; 
 little children get glimpses into subjects 
 of which old-fashioned little children 
 never heard." This is too true. Old- 
 fashioned people have old-fashioned 
 doubts about what seems to them a 
 showy, all-round substitute for educa- 
 tion, a sort of bluff at general culture, 
 such as we see when children, at great 
 expense to their schools (the new educa- 
 tion is almost ruinously expensive), dis- 
 sipate their minds by studying a little 
 of everything. I was delighted to hear 
 Professor Grandgent say not long ago, 
 " The curse of modern education is mul- 
 tiplication of subjects and painless meth- 
 ods." I suspect that in another genera- 
 tion we may even overdo the " enrich- 
 ing" of the grammar school. I do not 
 undervalue the pleasure and the profit 
 of what is called "a bowing acquaint- 
 ance " with a variety of subjects : the
 
 64 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 mistake is to accept such an acquaint- 
 ance as education. 
 
 The early specialization as to which I 
 have expressed doubt is made almost 
 necessary by the advance of learning, 
 the shortness of life, and the leanness of 
 pocketbooks. The false general educa- 
 tion is never necessary. People call it 
 broad ; but there is a big fallacy in the 
 word " broad." A horizontal line is no 
 broader than a perpendicular one. Just 
 so the line of study may stretch across 
 many subjects, and be quite as narrow 
 as if it really penetrated one. I still 
 doubt whether we can do better for our 
 children than, first, to drill them in a 
 few subjects, mostly old ones; then to 
 give them a modest general education in 
 college, or in all but the last year or two 
 of college ; then to let them specialize 
 as energetically as they can (but not ex- 
 clusively), and throughout to keep in 
 their minds, not pleasure only, but the 
 stern Lawgiver who wears the Godhead's 
 most benignant grace.
 
 AND CHARACTER 65 
 
 III 
 
 COLLEGE HONOR 
 
 " I X) an American college the word of 
 A all words is "truth." "Veritas" 
 is the motto of Harvard ; " Lux et Veri- 
 tas " the motto of Yale. On one of the 
 new Harvard gates is inscribed the com- 
 mand from the song in Isaiah, " Open 
 ye the gates, that the righteous nation 
 which keepeth the truth may enter in ; " 
 and no better text can be found for the 
 sons of our universities than " Ye shall 
 know the truth, and the truth shall make 
 you free." To guard the truth and to 
 proclaim the truth are duties which the 
 better colleges have, on the whole, hon- 
 estly performed. Now and then, in the 
 fancied opposition of religion and science, 
 a college has preferred to guard what it 
 believes to be one kind of truth rather
 
 66 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 than to proclaim another. " This is not 
 a comfortable place to teach science in," 
 said a young geologist who had gone 
 from Harvard to a university in the 
 West. " The President says, ' If any- 
 body asks questions about the antiquity 
 of the earth, send him to me.' " Yet, in 
 our older and stronger colleges at any 
 rate, fearless investigation and free and 
 fearless speech are the rule, even at the 
 sacrifice of popularity and of money. 
 
 Now, whether truth be truth of re- 
 ligion, or of science, or of commerce, 
 or of intercourse among fellow men, a 
 college to stand for it must believe in it. 
 As an institution of learning, a college 
 must be an institution of truth; as a 
 school of character, it must be a school 
 of integrity. It can have no other justi- 
 fication. Yet, outside of politicians and 
 horse-traders, no men are more commonly 
 charged with disingenuousness than col- 
 lege presidents ; and in no respectable 
 community are certain kinds of dishon-
 
 AND CHARACTER 67 
 
 esty more readily condoned than among 
 college students. The relation of college 
 to college, whether in a conference of 
 professors or in a contest of athletes, is 
 too often a relation of suspicion, if not 
 of charge and countercharge. Intercol- 
 legiate discussion of admission require- 
 ments may have an atmosphere, not 
 of common interest in education, but of 
 rivalry in intercollegiate politics ; and, 
 as everybody knows, a discussion of 
 athletics at one college frequently shows 
 an almost complete want of confidence 
 in the honesty of athletics at another. 
 Yet every college would maintain stead- 
 ily, and nearly every college would main- 
 tain honestly, that it stands for the truth. 
 When I speak of a college as believ- 
 ing in the truth, I mean first that its 
 President and Faculty must be honest 
 and fearless ; but I mean more than this. 
 I mean also that a high standard of honor 
 must be maintained by its undergradu- 
 ates ; for, far beyond the belief of most
 
 68 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 men, the standing of a college in the 
 community and the effect of a college 
 in the country depend on the personal 
 character of the undergraduates. This 
 personal character depends in a measure 
 on the straightforwardness and the hu- 
 man quality of the college teachers ; but 
 what Cardinal Newman says of intel- 
 lectual development in the university is 
 equally true of moral development : 
 " When a multitude of young men, 
 keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and ob- 
 servant, as young men are, come to- 
 gether and freely mix with each other, 
 they are sure to learn one from an- 
 other, even if there be no one to teach 
 them ; the conversation of all is a series 
 of lectures to each, and they gain for 
 themselves new ideas and views, fresh 
 matter of thought, and distinct principles 
 for judging and acting day by day. 
 
 " I am but saying that that youthful 
 community will constitute a whole, it
 
 AND CHARACTER 69 
 
 will embody a specific idea, it will re- 
 present a doctrine, it will administer a 
 code of conduct, and it will furnish prin- 
 ciples of thought and action. It will 
 give birth to a living teaching, which in 
 the course of time will take the shape of 
 a self-perpetuating tradition, or a genius 
 loci, as it is sometimes called; which 
 haunts the home where it has been born, 
 and which imbues and forms, more or 
 less, and one by one, every individual 
 who is successively brought under its 
 shadow. Thus it is that, independent 
 of direct instruction on the part of su- 
 periors, there is a sort of self-education 
 in the academic institutions of Protes- 
 tant England ; a characteristic tone of 
 thought, a recognized standard of judg- 
 ment, is found in them, which, as de- 
 veloped in the individual who is submit- 
 ted to it, becomes a twofold source of 
 strength to him, both from the distinct 
 stamp it impresses on his mind, and from 
 the bond of union which it creates be-
 
 yo SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 tween him and others, effects which 
 are shared by the authorities of the place, 
 for they themselves have been educated 
 in it, and at all times are exposed to the 
 influence of its ethical atmosphere." 
 
 In any community the students of a 
 college make a tremendous power for 
 good or evil ; and by them in college, 
 and by them after they have left college, 
 their college shall be judged. I as 
 Cardinal Newman puts it, the practical 
 end of a university course is " training 
 good members of society " (and, I may 
 add, training leaders of men), nothing 
 can be of more importance in a univer- 
 sity, and scarcely anything can be of 
 more importance in a community, than 
 the attitude of undergraduates in ques- 
 tions of truth and falsehood. 
 
 Those who constantly inspect this at- 
 titude find much to encourage them. 
 The undergraduate standard of honor for 
 college officers is so sensitively high that 
 no one need despair of the students'
 
 AND CHARACTER 71 
 
 ethical intelligence. No doubt, disin- 
 genuousness is sometimes believed of the 
 wrong man ; the upright professor with 
 a reserved or forbidding manner may 
 get a name for untrustworthiness, while 
 the honor of his less responsible but 
 more genial colleague is unquestioned : 
 yet the blindness here is the blindness of 
 youthful prejudice. The nature of dis- 
 ingenuousness is seen clearly enough ; 
 and the recognition of it in an instructor 
 condemns him for all time. There is 
 indeed but one way in which a man with- 
 out extraordinary personal charm may 
 gain and keep the confidence of students: 
 by scrupulous openness in all his deal- 
 ings with them, great or small. A mo- 
 ment's forgetfulness, a moment's evasive- 
 ness, even a moment's appearance of 
 evasiveness, may crack the thin ice 
 on which every college officer is skating 
 as best he can ; and the necessity of 
 keeping the secrets of less scrupulous 
 persons may break it through. In some
 
 72 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 ways all this is healthy. A young fel- 
 low who sees a high standard of truth 
 for anybody's conduct may in time see 
 it for his own. All he needs is to dis- 
 cover that the world was not made for 
 him only; and a year or two out of 
 college should teach him that. What 
 he lacks is not principle, but experience 
 and readjustment. This is the lack in 
 the average undergraduate. It is only 
 a highly exceptional student who speaks 
 frankly to all (college officers included) 
 of the lies he has told in tight places, 
 and who seems never to question an 
 implied premise that in tight places all 
 men lie. 
 
 Another healthy sign is the high stan- 
 dard of honor in athletic training. This 
 standard, indeed, may be cruelly high. 
 The slightest breach of training con- 
 demns a student in the eyes of a whole 
 college, and is almost impossible to live 
 down. Still another healthy sign is the 
 character of the men whom, in our best
 
 AND CHARACTER 73 
 
 colleges, the undergraduates instinctively 
 choose as class presidents, as athletic cap- 
 tains, and in general as leaders. Grown 
 men, electing a President of the United 
 States for four years, are not always so 
 fortunate as Harvard Freshmen, who 
 after eight or ten weeks of college expe- 
 rience choose one of their own number 
 for an office which he is practically sure 
 to hold throughout the four college 
 years. 1 With few exceptions, our un- 
 dergraduate leaders are straightforward, 
 manly fellows, who will join college 
 officers in any honest partnership for 
 the good of one student or of all, and 
 who shrink from any kind of meanness. 
 Want of a fine sense of honor appears 
 chiefly in athletic contests, in the author- 
 ship of written work, in excuses for neg- 
 lect of study, in the relation of students 
 to the rights of persons who are not stu- 
 
 1 Class presidents are usually football players ; 
 and, as a student once observed, " When a feller 
 plays football, it does n't take long to find out what 
 kind of a feller he is."
 
 74 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 dents, and in questions of duty to all who 
 are, or who are to be, nearest and dear- 
 est. Here are the discouraging signs; 
 but even these are a part of that lop- 
 sided immaturity which characterizes 
 privileged youth. It is natural, as has 
 been said, for boys to grow like colts, 
 one end at a time. The pity is that the 
 boy, who determines in a measure his 
 own growth, should be so late in devel- 
 oping the power to put himself into 
 another's place ; that the best education 
 which the country can proffer is so slow 
 in teaching to the chosen youth of the 
 nation the Golden Rule, or even that part 
 of the Golden Rule which results in 
 common honesty ; that the average col- 
 lege boy, frank and manly as he is, is 
 honest in spots, and shows in his honesty 
 little sense of proportion. 
 
 Take, for instance, that part of college 
 life into which the average boy throws 
 himself with most enthusiasm, athletic 
 sport, and see how far our students
 
 AND CHARACTER 75 
 
 have fallen below the ideal of honesty, 
 how far they still remain from a clear 
 sense of proportion. I recognize the 
 place of strategy in athletics ; and I by 
 no means agree with the gentleman who 
 stigmatized a college catcher as " up to 
 all the professional tricks " because " he 
 made a feint of throwing the ball in one 
 direction, and then threw it in another : " 
 yet the necessity of trusting a game to 
 what the umpire sees is deplorable. A 
 whole-souled and straightforward young 
 athlete told me once, with smiling good 
 humor, that a football player in his own 
 college (who had everybody's respect) 
 owed his success in the game to a knack 
 of holding his opponent in such a man- 
 ner as made his opponent seem to hold 
 him. Few college catchers, I suspect, 
 systematically resist the temptation of 
 pulling down a " ball " to make it look 
 like a " strike ; " and many cultivate 
 skill in this sleight of hand as a cardinal 
 point in the game. Even players who
 
 ;6 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 trip others, though in public they may 
 be hissed, and in private talked about 
 as "muckers," are likely to remain in 
 the team, and in some colleges may 
 become captains (whereas a Freshman 
 who breaks training by smoking a sin- 
 gle cigarette may be "queered " for his 
 whole college course). Many ball play- 
 ers use their tongues to confound or ex- 
 cite their adversaries ; and whole armies 
 of students, supported by a well-mean- 
 ing college press, make a business of 
 " rattling " a rival team by what ought 
 to be an inspiration, and not a weapon, 
 defensive or offensive, organized cheer- 
 ing. The youth who plays a clean game 
 is admired, but not always followed; 
 and the doctrine of Mr. Henry L. Hig- 
 ginson and Mr. R. C. Lehmann, that a 
 clean game comes first, and winning 
 comes second, though it strikes under- 
 graduates as faultless in theory and as 
 endearing in the men who preach it, is 
 not always suffered, in a hard game, to
 
 AND CHARACTER 77 
 
 interfere with "practical baseball" or 
 " practical football," expressions used 
 among undergraduates much as " prac- 
 tical politics " is used among men of the 
 world. 
 
 College dishonesty in written work is 
 hard to eradicate, because rooted in im- 
 palpable tradition, that damaging tra- 
 dition which exempts students from the 
 ordinary rules of right living, and re- 
 gards as venial, or even as humorous, 
 acts intrinsically allied to those of the 
 impostor, the forger, and the thief. It 
 is incredible that a youth of eighteen 
 should not see the dishonesty of hand- 
 ing in as his own work, for his own 
 credit, a piece of writing which he has 
 copied from a newspaper or from a 
 book, or from the writing of a fellow 
 student, or which he has paid another 
 man to write for him. Nobody who 
 can get into college is so stupid that he 
 cannot see the lie involved. Everybody 
 sees it clearly if the writing is for a
 
 78 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 prize, and if the fraud deprives a fellow 
 student of his fair chance ; but if a youth 
 has spent all his available time in ath- 
 letics, or in billiards, or at clubs, or at 
 dances, or at the theatre, and if a thesis 
 is due the next day, what is he to do ? 
 " A man must live," is a common cry 
 of dishonest persons out of college ; and 
 " A man must get through," is a suffi- 
 cient excuse for the dishonesty of stu- 
 dents. In talking with these dishonest 
 students, I have been struck by two 
 things : first, by their apparent inability 
 to see that nobody ever has to hand in 
 anything, and that handing in nothing 
 is infinitely better than handing in a dis- 
 honest thing; next, by their feeling that 
 their own cases are exceptional, since 
 the wrong was done "under pressure," 
 as if pressure did not account for the 
 offences of all amateur liars and forgers. 
 In many students, also, there remains 
 a trace of the old feeling that to cheat 
 is one thing, and to cheat a teacher is
 
 AND CHARACTER 79 
 
 another. Here is where generations of 
 tricky schoolboys have established a 
 practice as hard to overthrow by logic 
 as love of country or love of liquor, 
 or anything else, good or bad, which de- 
 pends on custom and feeling rather than 
 on reason. We may prove that it is 
 not honest to call a man we hate " Dear 
 Sir," or to call ourselves his " very truly; " 
 but custom sanctions it, and he expects 
 nothing better (or worse). We know 
 that killing harmless animals beyond 
 what can be used as food is wanton de- 
 struction of life precious to its posses- 
 sors ; but good people go on fishing and 
 shooting. Just so, if there is a tradition 
 that teachers are fair game, and if the 
 leaders among boys so regard them, 
 there is no social ostracism for dishon- 
 esty in written work. Dishonest boys 
 admit that an instructor who should 
 print as his own what his pupils after- 
 wards discovered in an earlier publica- 
 tion by another author would be de-
 
 8o SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 spised forever. Here, as elsewhere, the 
 students' standard for the Faculty is 
 faultlessly high ; here, as elsewhere, what 
 they need is to open their eyes to their 
 own relative position among men, to 
 see that, if people who cheat them are 
 liars, they themselves, whatever their 
 social self-complacency, are liars also if 
 they cheat other people. I would not 
 give the impression that most students 
 cheat or fail to condemn cheating, or that 
 colleges are not making steady progress 
 toward a higher sense of honor in this 
 matter which would be clear to a right- 
 minded child of ten. I mean merely 
 that, whereas outside of college (and the 
 custom house) the act of obvious dis- 
 honesty commonly puts the man into 
 bad repute, among undergraduates the 
 man often brings the act into better 
 repute by elevating it socially ; and that 
 this is a disgrace to an institution which 
 counts as its members the chosen youth 
 of an enlightened country. In this mat-
 
 AND CHARACTER 81 
 
 ter, it is encouraging to note the feeling 
 of the better students in Mr. Flandrau's 
 clever Diary of a Freshman; yet even 
 there the offence carries with it little or 
 nothing of social condemnation. It is 
 encouraging, also, to note the success of 
 the so-called " honor system " in schools 
 and colleges which have adopted it, and 
 the ostracism of those students who have 
 proved false to it. For myself, I cannot 
 see why a proctor in the examination 
 room is more than a reasonable safe- 
 guard, or why his presence there should 
 be more offensive than that of a police- 
 man in the street, to a student honest 
 and mature. It is only boys (whatever 
 their age) who take umbrage when a man 
 counts their change, or verifies their 
 assertions, or audits their accounts, or 
 refuses without security to cash their 
 checks, or refuses to please them by tes- 
 tifying to what he does not know. You 
 may believe in a boy through and 
 through, and by showing your belief in
 
 82 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 him you may help him to be honest; 
 but your belief in him does not warrant 
 your official testimony that he has suc- 
 cessfully completed a certain work, if 
 you have no evidence but his own de- 
 claration and the silence of his fellows. 
 Moreover, so far as my experience goes, 
 the hotbeds of college cheating are 
 not the important examinations superin- 
 tended by proctors; they are written 
 " quizzes " in the crowded classroom, or 
 themes, theses, forensics, compositions in 
 foreign languages, mathematical prob- 
 lems, any kind of written work done 
 out of the classroom ; and in all these 
 latter cases the students,, whether they 
 know it or not, are "put on their honor." 
 Theoretically, though in a doubtful case 
 I should always accept the word of a 
 suspected student, I object to the honor 
 system as nursing a false sensitiveness 
 that resents a kind of supervision which 
 everybody must sooner or later accept, 
 and as taking from the degree some part
 
 AND CHARACTER 83 
 
 of its sanction. If a student vouches 
 for his own examinations, why, it has 
 been asked, should he not sign his own 
 diploma, and stand on his honor before 
 the world as he has stood on it before 
 the Faculty? Yet, practically, I am 
 told, the honor system bids fair, where 
 it has been adopted, "to revolutionize 
 the whole spirit of undergraduate inter- 
 course with the Faculty." It is, at any 
 rate, as one of my correspondents says, 
 a " systematic endeavor by undergradu- 
 ates themselves to establish a much bet- 
 ter moral code in relation to written 
 work," and is therefore "an immense 
 moral gain in itself." Besides, I have 
 yet to meet a single man who has lived 
 under the honor system (as I have not) 
 who does not give it, in spite, perhaps, 
 of a priori scepticism, his absolute faith. 
 Sound or unsound, the honor system has 
 in it signs of hope. 
 
 The notion that makeshifts and ex- 
 cuses in place of attendance and work
 
 84 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 are different at college from what they 
 are elsewhere is another aspect of the 
 tradition to which I have referred. Able- 
 bodied youths are afflicted with diseases 
 that admit all pleasures and forbid all 
 duties, and if questioned closely are of- 
 fended because their word is not accepted 
 promptly and in full, even when it is 
 obviously of little worth. The dissipa- 
 tion of a night brings the headache of a 
 morning; and the student excuses him- 
 self as too sick for college work. On 
 the day before a ball and on the day 
 after it, a severe cold prevents a student 
 from attendance at college exercises ; but 
 he goes to the ball. Many undergrad- 
 uates treat their academic engagements 
 in a way that would lose them positions 
 at any business house inside of a week ; 
 yet no remorse affects their appetites or 
 their sleep. In this world, by the way, 
 it is not the just who sleep; it is the 
 irresponsible. 
 
 The openness with which these worth-
 
 AND CHARACTER 85 
 
 less excuses are offered is a sign that the 
 trouble is perverted vision rather than 
 radical moral obliquity. An ingenuous 
 youth, prevented by a cold from going 
 to college exercises, stood on a windy 
 ball field one raw day in the spring, and, 
 unabashed, coached his men before the 
 eyes of the officer whose business it was 
 to call him to account. Another insisted 
 to the same officer that a mark of absence 
 against him in a large lecture course was 
 a mistake; and when told that it was 
 not, exclaimed with honest warmth, 
 " Then the fellow who promised to sit 
 in my seat did n't do it ! " Both of these 
 boys were blinded by the tradition which 
 nearly all college literature has fostered, 
 and which nothing but eternal vigilance 
 and constant and prolonged care can de- 
 stroy. It is this tradition which led a 
 professor to say, " Students who won't 
 lie to an individual will lie to the college 
 office ; it is a soulless, impersonal thing." 
 Another aspect of this same compre-
 
 86 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 hensive tradition is the enthusiasm of 
 some Freshmen for stealing signs. There 
 was, indeed, a time when timid Fresh- 
 men bought signs, to have the reputation 
 of " ragging " them. The word " rag," 
 as I have said elsewhere, is more local, 
 more specific, and, when applied to our 
 own acts or to those of our friends, less 
 embarrassing than the word " steal." No 
 doubt the college stealer of signs, whether 
 youth or maiden, steals for fun, and has 
 not the same motive as the common 
 thief; yet the motive, as I see it, is no 
 higher. The implied general proposition 
 at the root of the act is the proposition 
 that students' privileges include the privi- 
 lege of disregarding the rights of others ; 
 the assumption that the world, of which 
 so much is bestowed on them, is theirs, 
 to disport themselves in. Sometimes 
 the stealing takes the form of destroying 
 property (breaking glass, for instance) ; 
 sometimes of robbing the very mother 
 who shelters the robber. "Do you re-
 
 AND CHARACTER 87 
 
 member what fun we had burning that 
 pile of lumber in front of Matthews 
 Hall ? " said a middle-aged clergyman 
 to a classmate. Yet Matthews Hall was 
 a generous gift to the University ; and 
 the students who destroyed the lumber 
 were picking the pocket of a benefac- 
 tor or of the Alma Mater herself. De- 
 struction of property is often an attempt 
 to celebrate athletic success ; it is, if the 
 phrase is pardonable, an ebullition of 
 misfit loyalty to the college whose pro- 
 perty is sacrificed, as if the son of a 
 successful candidate for the presidency 
 of the United States should celebrate his 
 father's victory by burning down his fa- 
 ther's house. Sometimes undergraduates 
 " pinch " bits of college property as tro- 
 phies, just as modern pilgrims have 
 shown their respect for the Pilgrim Fa- 
 thers by chipping off pieces of Plymouth 
 Rock. These kinds of college dishon- 
 esty are happily lessening, and are re- 
 garded as pardonable in Freshmen only,
 
 88 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 as evidence of " freshness " pure and 
 simple. That they exist at all is not 
 merely a scandal to the good name of 
 the college, but a menace to its prosper- 
 ity. The few foolish boys who are guilty 
 of them stand in the unthinking public 
 mind for the noble universities which 
 they misrepresent, until irritated trades- 
 men and city governments forget what 
 the college does for the community, and 
 view it merely as a rich corporation that 
 escapes taxes and fills the city with inso- 
 lent and dishonest youth. The irrespon- 
 sibility of some students in money mat- 
 ters, their high-minded indignation if a 
 tradesman to whom they have owed 
 money for years demands it in a manner 
 that does not meet their fancy, increases 
 the irritation ; and incalculable damage 
 is done. 
 
 After all, the most serious aspect of 
 college dishonesty is the dishonesty of 
 vice. Many persons who condemn vice 
 believe nevertheless that it belongs with
 
 AND CHARACTER 89 
 
 a character which, though its strength is 
 perverted, is open and hearty ; and now 
 and then this belief seems justified: but 
 those who see at close range the effects 
 of vice remember that bound up with 
 most of it is, and must be, faithlessness 
 to father and mother, and to the wife 
 and children who are soon to be. College 
 sentiment condemns habitual vice. Like 
 the sentiment of the world at large, it is 
 lenient (to men only) in occasional lapses 
 from virtue, unless a lapse involves 
 a breach of athletic training. Here too 
 we mark that want of proportion which 
 characterizes undergraduate judgments 
 of college honor. The youth who squan- 
 ders in vice the money which his father, 
 at a sacrifice, has sent him for his term 
 bill may be a good fellow yet; the 
 youth who breaks training is a disgrace 
 to his Alma Mater. 
 
 In dwelling on certain kinds of col- 
 lege dishonesty, I have not forgotten that 
 in some respects the college sense of
 
 9 o SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 honor is the keenest in the community, 
 and that no higher ideal can be found on 
 earth than in the best thought of our 
 best universities. What I have pointed 
 out must be taken as stray survivals of 
 an intensely vital tradition, survivals 
 which in a democracy like our own have 
 no right to be. The public sentiment of 
 our colleges is becoming, year by year, 
 cleaner and clearer-sighted. We move 
 forward, and not slowly. What makes 
 some persons impatient is the need of 
 teaching to the picked young men of 
 America that a lie is a lie, whoever tells 
 it, and a theft a theft, whoever commits 
 it; and that a college student, though 
 he gains more blessings than his neigh- 
 bor, does not gain thereby the right to 
 appropriate his neighbor's goods. In our 
 impatience, we forget that to teach an 
 axiom takes years and generations if the 
 axiom contradicts tradition; and we for- 
 get that, when all is said, our under- 
 graduates themselves are constantly pu- 
 rifying and uplifting college honor.
 
 AND CHARACTER 91 
 
 IV 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF GRAMMAR-SCHOOL 
 TRAINING l 
 
 WHOEVER looks into systems 
 of education is almost sure to 
 see something that needs reform, and is 
 inclined to believe that the methods of 
 his own day are all wrong. Thus it has 
 come to pass that every year or every 
 month, according to the degree of pro- 
 gressiveness in the community, new theo- 
 ries of education are sprung on us, and, 
 it may be, tried on our children. Now, 
 as everybody knows, it is ten times as 
 easy to destroy as to reconstruct, and a 
 hundred times as easy to find fault as to 
 suggest practicable and wise and durable 
 
 1 A paper read before the Department of Super- 
 intendence (National Educational Association) at 
 Chicago, February, 1901.
 
 92 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 improvement. The history of education, 
 like the history of the world, is a history 
 of countless mistakes, with much noble 
 effort and many noble results. There is 
 no reason why education should not ad- 
 mit new light as other sciences admit it, 
 as medicine, for example, admits it; 
 but reform in education has been, and 
 still is, alloyed with religious prejudice, 
 with politics, and with personal power 
 and whim, till in our less hopeful mo- 
 ments the education of boys and girls 
 seems the stamping-ground of experi- 
 ment and fad. In these experiments for 
 the enlightenment of colleges and schools 
 we sometimes forget the oldest and the 
 best truths of education itself. 
 
 From Milton, though parts of his one 
 pamphlet on education are an astound- 
 ing example of the reformer's lack of 
 practical sense, we may get as good a 
 definition as has ever been devised. " I 
 call a complete and generous education," 
 says Milton, " that which fits a man to
 
 AND CHARACTER 93 
 
 perform justly, skilfully, and magnani- 
 mously all the offices, both private and 
 public, of peace and war." Accepting 
 this definition, I come with an old story, 
 a story which I have told before, and 
 must tell the worse when I try to put 
 it into new language ; a story, therefore, 
 which here and there I shall let other 
 people tell for me. 
 
 At the start, I must disclaim any inside 
 knowledge of school systems ; and for 
 this reason it may seem that I ought not 
 to speak of school systems at all. My 
 excuse is twofold, the a priori princi- 
 ple in the relation of hard work to solid 
 success, and the unmistakable signs that 
 in modern theories of education this 
 principle is often slighted or ignored. 
 In a certain sense I speak as an outsider, 
 yet as an outsider who has, and who 
 feels his right to have, a conviction, 
 a conviction that the end of the Ameri- 
 can public school is to insure the intel- 
 lectual discipline which is itself a moral
 
 94 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 force, and which may point for its result 
 to an educated nation. 
 
 The first lesson of education is the 
 lesson of getting down to hard work, 
 and doing the work thoroughly. It may 
 be learned by a boy or girl who never 
 goes to school, learned in a mill or on 
 a farm; but the highest work in this 
 part of the world must commonly be 
 done by people who for a greater or less 
 number of years have spent the best part 
 of at least five days out of seven for some 
 forty weeks a year in what we call edu- 
 cation. The first business of a school 
 is to teach concentration, application, 
 power of tackling intellectual work, 
 qualities which sooner or later a man 
 must have if he is to succeed in life, and 
 which he got in his boyhood if he had 
 the right kind of parents, was the right 
 kind of boy, and went to the right kind 
 of school. (I speak of boys. I bid 
 good-by to the girls here and now, leav- 
 ing them to be " understood " through- 
 out most of what I have to say.)
 
 AND CHARACTER 95 
 
 Some of us, now in middle life, recall 
 the days when, as one of my old neigh- 
 bors puts it, " we were on earth the first 
 time ; " and we recall the grammar schools 
 of those days, the bare walls, the single 
 dictionary as the library of each room, 
 and the curriculum, which nobody had 
 dreamt of" enriching ; " reading, writing, 
 spelling, arithmetic (quite enough arith- 
 metic), English grammar, and Quack- 
 enbos's History of the United States ; 
 nothing to attract the eye, no festivity 
 except at recess, no music, no intellec- 
 tual food outside of the curriculum ex- 
 cept an occasional address of five minutes 
 by a more or less illiterate mayor and an 
 occasional question from a rather bashful 
 superintendent (those were early days). 
 For discipline, besides a flogging now 
 and then, the boy who turned his head 
 round to the boy behind him had to 
 stand on the platform with a spring 
 clothespin on his nose till he saw an- 
 other boy turn his head and transferred 
 the clothespin to him.
 
 96 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 Such education had its drawbacks, 
 moral, intellectual, and above all aes- 
 thetic : yet some of us may well look back 
 to it as the surest and truest discipline 
 of our lives ; for we were taught to work. 
 Sometimes, if you are to turn a college 
 loafer into a man, you send him to a 
 factory, with long and early hours, and 
 immediate responsibility to an officer. 
 You do this because his salvation is 
 work, and because, blind as he now is 
 to the beauty of the intellectual work 
 that he may do, he needs to be educated 
 by manual labor that he must do. You 
 give him work as education. All educa- 
 tion is work. This obvious but endan- 
 gered doctrine is what I am here to 
 preach. 
 
 " Work," says Bushnell, " is activity 
 for an end ; play activity as an end. 
 One prepares the fund or resources of 
 enjoyment ; the other is enjoyment it- 
 self. When a man goes into agriculture, 
 trade, or the shop, he consents to under-
 
 AND CHARACTER 97 
 
 take a certain expenditure of care and 
 labor, which is only a form of painstaking 
 (rightly named), in order to obtain some 
 ulterior good which is to be his reward ; 
 but when a child goes to his play, it is 
 no painstaking, no means to an end: it 
 is itself, rather, both end and joy." 
 
 Now the tendency of education in this 
 country is to turn work into play, just as 
 the tendency of outdoor games in this 
 country is to turn play into work. For 
 early education we have the kindergar- 
 ten ; for football we have relentless train- 
 ing. Have you ever thought of one 
 reason why athletics in American col- 
 leges mean so much? It is athletics in 
 which many a youth, pampered at home 
 and at school, gets his only taste of the 
 stern discipline without which he cannot 
 be a man. His studies he evades, and 
 his friends pardon the evasion ; his foot- 
 ball he cannot evade, or he is branded 
 as a " quitter," as " soft," or " sandless." 
 From his studies he gets more or less
 
 98 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 culture, but no backbone ; from his foot- 
 ball he gets the stuff and substance of 
 his education. The business man often 
 prefers in his office a successful college 
 athlete to a successful college scholar ; 
 for the athlete, as the business man says, 
 "has done something." 
 
 The public school should have at least 
 as much educational power as football. 
 Setting aside the question of manual 
 training, a question of great importance 
 to many boys, and speaking of a gram- 
 mar school, I believe that the business 
 of the grammar school is to teach a few 
 subjects, essential or of prime impor- 
 tance, and, in teaching them, to give the 
 training which enables people "to do 
 things." The grammar school is for the 
 greatest good of the greatest number. 
 If we are inclined to condemn it for 
 ignoring the individual, we should re- 
 member that strength may come to the 
 individual from being ignored, from be- 
 ing treated as one among many who are
 
 AND CHARACTER 99 
 
 treated and trained alike. Individual 
 education is the right of a man ; to a less 
 degree it is the right of a youth ; to some 
 degree it is the right of everybody : but 
 everybody has also that other right of 
 education in common with his equals, 
 his superiors, and even with his inferiors, 
 education in which he may see the effect 
 of teaching on a variety of minds, each 
 different from his own, and may learn 
 from his fellows as they may learn from 
 him. 
 
 Again and again I have seen, in col- 
 lege, students who have become almost 
 hopelessly debilitated from excessive at- 
 tention to their individual needs, or, 
 rather, to what their parents have believed 
 to be their individual needs ; who have 
 never known the stimulus of competi- 
 tion ; whose sharp corners have been 
 carefully sharpened more and more, and 
 never rounded off; the bent of whose 
 minds has been followed till their minds 
 have lost all power of attention and con-
 
 zoo SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 centration, unless something new has 
 come to fascinate them, so that their very 
 attention has seemed a weakness rather 
 than a strength, a yielding of the mind 
 rather than a conquering by the mind. 
 The business of the grammar school is 
 not to follow the mind, but to lead it ; 
 nor is it to entertain or amuse, though 
 a good teacher will entertain and amuse 
 incidentally ; nor is it to teach so many 
 things that none can be taught well. It 
 is to drill and drill and drill ; to teach 
 accuracy, concentration, self-command, 
 so that he who has been faithful in a few 
 things may be fit, with increasing years 
 and ripening powers, to be ruler over 
 many things. In the grammar school 
 few subjects are essential. Chief among 
 these is the use of the English language. 
 If enough sensible trainers of the voice 
 could be found, I should be tempted to 
 add elocution. Who does not know the 
 strained, high voice of a reciting child 
 or of a chiding schoolmistress *? Who
 
 AND CHARACTER 101 
 
 that has to use his voice in a large room 
 does not know the weariness of not using 
 it well ? A little mathematics, a little 
 geography and history, possibly a little 
 physics, and a great deal of reading, 
 writing, and speaking in the English 
 tongue, these things well taught make 
 a foundation on which any structure of 
 intellectual education may safely rest 
 Narrow, if you will, but about as wide 
 as a child's foundation can be laid and 
 laid firmly. A few fundamental studies 
 with the habit of mastering the work in 
 hand are an infinitely better basis for the 
 child than a heterogeneous collection of 
 half-learned, cultivating diversions, over 
 which he may sprawl, but on which he 
 can never stand. A few studies rightly 
 taught are the first intellectual step toward 
 " that which fits a man to perform justly, 
 skilfully, and magnanimously all the of- 
 fices, both private and public, of peace 
 and war." Sometimes people complain 
 of drill as benumbing the mind of a child;
 
 102 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 and the complaint, if the child is young 
 and the drill severe, has foundation. Yet 
 these same persons fail to see how de- 
 moralizing to the mind of a child an 
 excessive number of studies may be. 
 Children, as everybody knows, love re- 
 petition in their amusements, and can 
 stand much more of it in their instruc- 
 tion than their elders can. By multi- 
 plying the subjects which we set before 
 them, we run the risk, not merely of 
 dissipating their minds, but of overstim- 
 ulating them. I do not mean that even 
 a grammar school should ignore the 
 value of variety ; and I am glad that 
 music is now taught in our public 
 schools. I mean much what a corre- 
 spondent of mine meant when he wrote : 
 " I would have a boy use the English 
 language decently, even if he loses the 
 opportunity to study German in the 
 grammar school." What threatens our 
 early education nowadays is the amuse- 
 ment and variety theory. Working up-
 
 AND CHARACTER log 
 
 ward from the kindergarten, it bids fair 
 to weaken the intellect and to sap the 
 will.* A well-known teacher in Boston 
 had no difficulty in picking out the 
 members of his school who had begun 
 their education in the kindergarten ; and 
 he picked them out because of a weak- 
 ness in their intellectual processes. There 
 are exceptions and notable ones ; and 
 there is, as everybody knows, a lovely 
 side to the kindergarten : but the danger 
 of the kindergarten principle is felt by 
 many a teacher who hardly dares hint 
 at it. An elective system in college 
 gives a noble liberty to the man who has 
 been so trained that he can use his liberty 
 wisely ; but when an elective system goes 
 lower and lower into our schools till it 
 meets children who have been amused 
 through the years in which they should 
 have been educated, what chance have 
 these children for the best thing in edu- 
 cation ?
 
 104 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 " On a huge hill 
 Cragged and steep, Truth stands ; and he that will 
 
 Reach her about must, and about it go, 
 And what th' hill's suddenness resists, win so." 
 
 That I am not fighting shadows or 
 knocking down men of straw, the testi- 
 mony of a hundred teachers and parents 
 makes clear. The amusement theory, 
 starting in an honest and benignant de- 
 sire to show children the beauty of the 
 world about them and to rouse their 
 interest in study, especially in the study 
 of nature, may end with the sacrifice of 
 strength in the pupil and of truth in the 
 teacher ; may become a sweetmeat theory, 
 giving the children food which debilitates 
 and deranges the organs that crave it. 
 
 Certainly the education of boys should 
 not be a bore and a bugbear, nor should it 
 ignore culture. Yet the culture should 
 not crowd out training ; it should rather 
 be atmospheric : it should come to the 
 boy from the finer, maturer, and more 
 sensitive character of his teacher; it
 
 AND CHARACTER 105 
 
 should take little visible or tangible part 
 in the school programme ; it should 
 pervade the whole. In the best teacher, 
 also, is a personal force that inspires 
 some boys with the desire to work and 
 compels others to work, till working be- 
 comes a precious, even a priceless, habit 
 of their lives. He is not full of devices 
 and patent appliances for interesting his 
 pupils ; he is not full of theories and 
 fads : he does his own work, even the 
 drudgery of it, with enthusiasm for it and 
 for his calling. He corrects, chastens, 
 guides, kindles the love of learning; and 
 constantly he gives to eager eyes some 
 glimpses of that high enjoyment to which 
 learning and discipline may lead : but 
 he never sacrifices the discipline to any 
 royal road of pleasure. 
 
 This is another way of saying that the 
 good teacher does not sacrifice truth " to 
 make things interesting." I have lately 
 read an admirable paper by Miss Soule, 
 of Brookline, Mass., on the foolish un-
 
 io6 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 truthfulness of some books designed to 
 interest children in nature. Miss Soule 
 cites a well-known superintendent of 
 public schools who maintains that plants, 
 if they are to interest children, " must be 
 instinct with human attributes ; " and to 
 illustrate his theory (about animals as well 
 as plants) she has collected from books 
 for children a good many specimens 
 of biological mendacity. Children, she 
 says, are taught that " the kind cow " 
 gives them her milk ; that " a plant does 
 not like to send its young, delicate leaves 
 and flowers into the cold world without 
 wrapping them up, any more than your 
 mother would like to send your baby 
 brother out for the first time without a 
 great deal of such bundling up ; " that 
 the queen bee " is very generous to the 
 young queen, who of course is her own 
 daughter, and leaves all the furniture and 
 silver spoons and everything of that sort 
 behind." " What," says Miss Soule, " is 
 gained by this ? " She tells the effect
 
 AND CHARACTER 107 
 
 of it on two children. One, who was lit- 
 eral, said : " Why, she could n't leave 
 furniture and silver spoons, because she 
 did n't have any to leave. That is not 
 a very true book, is it ? " Another, and 
 brighter, child exclaimed : " How silly 
 that is ! It is so stupid to pretend things 
 like that when they could not ever be." 
 " Yet," says Miss Soule, " this child is 
 very imaginative, delights in fairy tales, 
 and lived Alice in Wonderland for 
 weeks." Imaginative literature may do 
 what it likes with plants and animals. 
 Alice in Wonderland, though she may 
 not teach children respectful manners, 
 cannot teach them biological untruth. 
 Mr. Kipling's Rikki Tikki Tavi is one 
 of the best stories in the English language 
 for old or young ; and his Toomai of the 
 Elephants has a poetic beauty which it 
 is a distinction for a child to feel. Im- 
 aginative literature is one thing, and 
 books for instruction are quite another. 
 Yet one teacher cited to Miss Soule that
 
 io8 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 dismal joke about the queen bee and the 
 silver spoons as " so taking, so cute ! " 
 " This method of awakening interest," 
 says Miss Soule, " puts child and animals 
 into false relations, and nothing is gained 
 by it except possibly an added interest on 
 the part of the child. Since this interest 
 is based upon conditions which do not 
 exist, the child has no right to it. The 
 animals are not interesting in that way" 
 In the same paper Miss Soule compares 
 " soft pedagogics " with peptonized food. 
 After reading Miss Soule's paper, one 
 of the best graduates of one of the best 
 kindergarten schools wrote to the author 
 that she (the teacher) " was circulating 
 that paper among all the teachers she 
 knew, because it had shown her that she 
 and the other kindergarten teachers were 
 doing dishonest work for the sake of 
 ease and arousing interest, and that the 
 modern schoolbooks all tended to in- 
 crease this dishonesty." " It is better," 
 said an American humorist, "not to
 
 AND CHARACTER 109 
 
 know so much than to know so many 
 things that ain't so." 
 
 An able teacher in Boston, struggling 
 against what she believes to be debilitat- 
 ing methods in the education of to-day, 
 writes of her own work as " an uphill, 
 out-of-date attempt to keep a simple, 
 healthy school ; " and adds that in the 
 attempt she is "constantly losing her 
 grip on the Back Bay." From another 
 teacher of long experience, who writes 
 about modern methods of teaching lan- 
 guages, I quote at some length : 
 
 "Since the attack on the old system 
 of teaching languages, English as well as 
 Latin and Greek, became effective in an 
 iconoclastic sense, and ineffective in the 
 way of suggesting a better system, the 
 teacher in the secondary schools has been 
 swamped in what I, remembering my 
 friends' experiences with Dr. Sauveur 
 many years ago, have been inclined to 
 call Sauveurism. Sauveurism in teach- 
 ing, you will remember, spread rapidly,
 
 no SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 attacked many college centres, and in- 
 fected violently the opponents of the 
 classical system. It was for a time hailed 
 as the true scientific treatment of all lan- 
 guage study, and it really had in it one 
 element of true scientific method, the 
 cumulative gathering of facts on which 
 to theorize ; but the gathering of facts 
 proved in the main to be desultory 
 and the theories nebulous and valueless. 
 This Sauveur rage, while it had its good 
 side in practical training for the spoken 
 language, struck at the root of all sound 
 scientific method in language study. 
 The good in it was as old as the hills, 
 and was already as effectively used in 
 good schools of the classical order as it 
 ever was by Sauveur. The evil in it was 
 its claim that a no-system was better 
 than a system. It threw out what was 
 known and classified. Where true sci- 
 ence teaches by rule and tests by experi- 
 ment, this held that cumulative labora- 
 tory work was all in all. The Sauveur
 
 AND CHARACTER in 
 
 method was the first wild attempt to 
 replace with a working system the old 
 grammatical training of the schools. It 
 failed and is forgotten. Taking what 
 was good in it, not from Sauveur, but 
 from the old methods, as old as the hills, 
 a few practical teachers, like Daniell 
 and Collar, themselves trained in the old 
 schools, have reintroduced good gram- 
 matical work in Latin and Greek instruc- 
 tion. This is elementary training only, 
 but it serves to shorten the period of 
 drudgery and open up early the rich 
 stores of Latin and Greek literature, 
 stores to be best enjoyed without the 
 excess of annotation and cross-reference 
 which some of the literature specialists 
 are attaching to our English classics in- 
 tended for schools. English grammar 
 also has its method and should, I believe, 
 be taught early and thoroughly, the dry 
 details not shunned. In getting these 
 the memory may receive as exact a 
 training as it used to get in the old [Bos-
 
 ii2 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 ton] Latin School under Gardner. Once 
 bedded in the mind, the grammatical 
 details should be allowed to repose there, 
 as well forgotten as the flower seed is 
 forgotten when the blossom is sweet in 
 the winds. If they are stirred again, as 
 the young college specialists (not the 
 best of them) are stirring them, I believe 
 the mind will never acquire that fine 
 sense of literary charm that used to be 
 acquired under Channing and Child. I 
 have recalled Sauveur, only because he 
 stands in my memory as the bete noire of 
 some years of my life spent in teaching 
 English and the classics. But he has 
 passed and is forgotten. Other fads have 
 taken the place of his in language and 
 other studies." 
 
 This teacher expresses "doubt as to 
 the robustness of vigor acquired by roll- 
 ing downhill along the lines of least re- 
 sistance," " as if," he says, " mental vigor 
 were to be got in the malarial tracts and 
 not on the windy and difficult heights."
 
 AND CHARACTER 113 
 
 "Some years ago," he adds, "when I 
 asked my boy what he should like to do 
 for a living, his answer was : ' I should 
 like to loaf on salary.' As he has had 
 no such soft elective open to him, he is 
 now doing very honest work." 
 
 The windy and difficult heights ! 
 Can any healthy man or woman com- 
 pare the pleasure of " loafing on salary " 
 to the pleasure of scaling " the windy 
 and difficult heights " *? Indeed, the cry 
 of those who scale these heights is : 
 "Give a boy liberty, and he too will 
 scale them. He will use liberty wisely, 
 because in the wise use of it he will find 
 the keenest enjoyment of the intellectual 
 life." But a boy, while he is a boy, does 
 not see all this. A student from a fa- 
 mous preparatory school, the head master 
 of which is a vigorous and cultivated 
 man, knew almost nothing of the English 
 language. " With the methods of teach- 
 ing they have now," said his father, " I 
 do not see how a boy learns anything.
 
 ii4 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 I really believe," he added, " that the 
 reason my boy does poorly in his math- 
 ematics is because he does not know 
 the language in which it is taught. It 
 would never occur to him to look up a 
 word in the dictionary." This is the 
 kind of boy who expects in college that 
 form of education which Mr. Dooley 
 describes when he says : " Th' prisidint 
 takes him into a Turkish room, gives 
 him a cigareet, an' says : * Me dear boy, 
 what special branch iv larnin' wud ye 
 like to have studied f'r ye be our com- 
 pitint professors ? ' " l the kind of boy 
 that leads the same philosopher not to 
 care what the children study so long as 
 it is disagreeable to them. 
 
 Now and then a man born of the best 
 stock, trained with the best training of 
 an earlier generation, filled with high 
 purpose and noble enthusiasm, fails to 
 see that the average child of to-day may 
 be swamped by a liberty which to him 
 i The italics are mine.
 
 AND CHARACTER 115 
 
 would be buoyant life. He has learned 
 the triumphant happiness of difficult 
 work well done, and forgets the time 
 when even he, in a school of to-day, 
 might not have learned it. Let us thank 
 every teacher who has helped us to see 
 that, if we do anything as well as we can 
 and keep on doing it, it must become 
 interesting. I too believe that boys and 
 girls should enjoy education, should love 
 the work of it. By and by they must 
 spend the greater part of their waking 
 hours in work ; and if they cannot enjoy 
 work, the work that lies before them, 
 they will lead unhappy lives. The late 
 Professor Dunbar assigned as one cause 
 of President Eliot's extraordinary success 
 his keen enjoyment of work. Some men 
 live on " the windy and difficult heights," 
 mountain-climbers by instinct and by 
 training ; but will the youth of vulgar 
 heritage and custom-made education 
 grapple with the cliffs, or will he light a 
 cigarette and lie down?
 
 n6 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 I am not attacking the elective system 
 in colleges. I believe with President 
 Tucker that " a considerable amount of 
 unawakened, uninterested mind in our 
 colleges has been recovered by this sys- 
 tem ; " that " it represents the final appeal 
 to the indifferent student ; " and that " it 
 gives responsibility and stimulus to the 
 diligent." Yet its representing the final 
 intellectual appeal is a confession of 
 weakness in some early processes. Be- 
 sides, if the elective system gets into the 
 grammar school, it will in some measure 
 defeat its own end in the college. It 
 will cut off many a boy from the liberty 
 in whose name it was created, by send- 
 ing him to college unfit for a number of 
 the elective courses which would other- 
 wise be open to him. Then, if roused 
 at last to an interest in work, he will 
 "feel the weight" of the "chance de- 
 sires " which led him blindly away from 
 what was to be his goal. Suppose he 
 loves literature, but not language, and in
 
 AND CHARACTER 117 
 
 the complacency of youth sets out to be 
 a specialist in literature, with " no use," 
 as he says, for the ancient classics: the 
 higher he rises in his specialty, the more 
 keenly he will feel the want of the Greek 
 and Latin which he might have mastered 
 once so much more readily than he can 
 master them now. Or, not to mention 
 Greek and Latin, suppose he loves to 
 write, but not to study grammar: he 
 may be clever and may acquire skill in 
 writing ; but the greater his success, the 
 deeper will be his regret, if he comes to 
 write of difficult subjects, that he threw 
 away the opportunity of early grammat- 
 ical training. 
 
 The early studies, I repeat, should be 
 the studies that are at the root of all. 
 These are the right studies for boys whose 
 book-learning stops with the grammar 
 school: they are equally right for boys 
 who will in time be doctors of philoso- 
 phy. In the hands of a good teacher 
 they are interesting, with no strain on
 
 n8 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 truth : first, because to an awakened 
 mind every study has its charm ; and, 
 next, because through them a good 
 teacher may train a boy to the enjoy- 
 ment of vigorous work. 
 
 I am talking of intellectual work. 
 Sewing for girls and carving for boys 
 are first-rate things and may well be 
 taught in public institutions; but they 
 should not in an American grammar 
 school crowd out intellectual opportu- 
 nity. As to the hundred pretty and inter- 
 esting things with which we are tempted 
 to decorate school programmes, let us 
 remember that " the foundation must be 
 stronger than the superstructure." " Fine 
 stockings, fine shoes, fine yellow hair," 
 and a " double ruffle round her neck " did 
 not make up in Ducky Dilver's lamented 
 wife for the want of a petticoat; and 
 it is even so with frills in education. 
 Without the essential garments of the 
 mind, the frills may become a mockery. 
 
 " I will tell you, gentlemen," says
 
 AND CHARACTER 119 
 
 Cardinal Newman, " what has been the 
 practical error of the last twenty years 
 [we must add many more years now]. 
 Not to load the memory of the student 
 with a mass of undigested knowledge ; 
 but to force upon him so much that he 
 has rejected all. It has been the error of 
 distracting and enfeebling the mind by 
 an unmeaning profusion of subjects ; of 
 implying that a smattering in a dozen 
 branches of study is not shallowness, 
 which it really is, but enlargement, which 
 it is not ; of considering an acquaintance 
 with the learned names of things and 
 persons, and the possession of clever 
 duodecimos, and attendance on eloquent 
 lecturers, and membership with scientific 
 institutions, and the sight of the experi- 
 ments of a platform, and the specimens 
 of a museum, that all this was not dis- 
 sipation of mind, but progress. All things 
 now are to be learned at once ; not first 
 one thing and then another ; not one 
 well, but many badly. Learning is to be
 
 120 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 without exertion, without attention, with- 
 out toil, without grounding, without ad- 
 vance, without finish." 
 
 " There are youths," says the same 
 great writer, "... who certainly have a 
 taste for reading, but in whom it is little 
 more than the result of mental restless- 
 ness and curiosity. Such minds cannot 
 fix their gaze on one object for two sec- 
 onds together; the very impulse that 
 leads them to read at all leads them to 
 read on, and never to stay or hang over 
 any one idea. The pleasurable excite- 
 ment of reading what is new is their 
 motive principle, and the imagination 
 that they are doing something, and the 
 boyish vanity that accompanies it, are 
 their reward. Such youths often profess 
 to like poetry, or to like history or bio- 
 graphy ; they are fond of lectures on cer- 
 tain of the physical sciences; or they 
 may possibly have a real and true taste 
 for natural history or other cognate sub- 
 jects ; and so far they may be regarded
 
 AND CHARACTER 121 
 
 with satisfaction ; but, on the other hand, 
 they profess that they do not like logic, 
 they do not like algebra, they have no 
 taste for mathematics ; which only means 
 that they do not like application, they 
 do not like attention, they shrink from 
 the effort and labor of thinking, and the 
 process of true intellectual gymnastics. 
 The consequence will be that, when they 
 grow up, they may, if it so happen, be 
 agreeable in conversation; they may be 
 well informed in this or that department 
 of knowledge; they may be what is 
 called literary; but they will have no con- 
 sistency, steadiness, or perseverance ; they 
 will not be able to make a telling speech, 
 or to write a good letter, or to fling in 
 debate a smart antagonist, unless so far 
 as, now and then, mother-wit supplies a 
 sudden capacity, which cannot be ordi- 
 narily counted on. They cannot state an 
 argument or a question, or take a clear 
 survey of a whole transaction, or give 
 sensible and appropriate advice under
 
 122 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 difficulties, or do any of those things 
 which inspire confidence and gain influ- 
 ence, which raise a man in life, and make 
 him useful to his religion or his country." 
 Elsewhere Cardinal Newman says : 
 "The displays of eloquence, or the 
 interesting matter contained in their lec- 
 tures, the variety of useful or entertain- 
 ing knowledge contained in their libra- 
 ries, though admirable in themselves, 
 and advantageous to the student at a 
 later stage of his course, never can serve 
 as a substitute for methodical and labo- 
 rious teaching. A young man of sharp 
 and active intellect, who has had no 
 other training, has little to show for it 
 besides a litter of ideas heaped up into 
 his mind anyhow. He can utter a num- 
 ber of truths or sophisms, as the case may 
 be; and one is as good to him as an- 
 other. He is up with a number of doc- 
 trines and a number of facts ; but they 
 are all loose and straggling, for he has 
 no principles set up in his mind round
 
 AND CHARACTER 123 
 
 which to aggregate and locate them. 
 He can say a word or two on half a 
 dozen sciences, but not a dozen words 
 on any one. He says one thing now, 
 and another thing presently; and when 
 he attempts to write down distinctly 
 what he holds upon a point in dispute, 
 or what he understands by its terms, he 
 breaks down and is surprised at his fail- 
 ure. He sees objections more clearly 
 than truths, and can ask a thousand ques- 
 tions which the wisest of men cannot 
 answer; and withal he has a very good 
 opinion of himself, and is well satisfied 
 with his attainments, and he declares 
 against others, as opposed to the spread 
 of knowledge altogether, who do not 
 happen to adopt his ways of furthering 
 it, or the opinions in which he considers 
 it to result." 
 
 Still again : 
 
 " But the intellect which has been dis- 
 ciplined to the perfection of its powers, 
 which knows, and thinks while it knows,
 
 124 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 which has learned to leaven the dense 
 mass of facts and events with the elastic 
 force of reason, such an intellect can- 
 not be partial, cannot be exclusive, can- 
 not be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, 
 cannot but be patient, collected, and 
 majestically calm, because it discerns 
 the end in every beginning, the origin in 
 every end, the law in every interruption, 
 the limit in each delay ; because it ever 
 knows where it stands, and how its path 
 lies from one point to another." 
 
 Men look at any system of education, 
 and are dissatisfied, because no system 
 does for everybody what education 
 should do. They would gather grapes 
 from thorns and figs from thistles. They 
 forget that even the best seed may fall 
 on stony ground or be eaten by the 
 fowls of the air. They forget that no 
 schoolmaster and no school system can 
 make over a boy's ancestors, or banish 
 his temptations, or give eyes to the 
 blind ; and they have their visions, their
 
 AND CHARACTER 125 
 
 theories, their panaceas ; and people rush 
 after their panaceas as people rush after 
 other panaceas, to find that the pana- 
 cea comes and goes, while the disease 
 abides; and the steadfast old teacher 
 almost loses heart, like the steadfast old 
 physician who sees people stake their 
 money and their lives on a new patent 
 medicine, on irrational healers of all 
 sorts, on persons who prescribe from ex- 
 amining locks of hair or from looking 
 at the stars; but by and by he says to 
 himself: '"This, too, shall pass.' Of 
 the new teachers the dishonest will soon 
 reveal themselves; and from the hon- 
 estly mistaken some good may come. 
 I will stand by a few things that I know. 
 I know that it is better to concentrate 
 the mind than to dissipate it, to train it 
 than to pamper it. I know that there is 
 no courage and no intellectual joy like 
 the courage and the joy of that effort 
 which ends in mastery. New systems 
 may come and go. I will take with
 
 i26 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 gratitude whatever in any one of them 
 adds beauty, interest, helpful variety, 
 cultivating influence, any kind of 
 strength or glory, to a task as perplex- 
 ing as it is noble : yet not for one mo- 
 ment shall I forget that sound training 
 comes before varied accomplishment; 
 that there is no strength and no glory 
 like that of duty steadily and bravely 
 done."
 
 AND CHARACTER 127 
 
 THE TRANSITION FROM SCHOOL TO 
 COLLEGE 
 
 life is the supreme privi- 
 lege of youth. Rich men's sons 
 from private schools may take it care- 
 lessly, as something to enjoy unearned, 
 like their own daily bread ; yet the true 
 title to it is the title earned in college 
 day by day. The privilege of entering 
 college admits to the privilege of deserv- 
 ing college ; college life belongs to the 
 great things, at once joyous and solemn, 
 that are not to be entered into lightly. 
 
 Now the things that are not to be 
 entered into lightly (such as marriage 
 and the ministry) are often the things 
 that men enter prepared viciously or not 
 prepared at all ; and college life is no 
 exception. " There had always lain a
 
 128 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 pleasant notion at the back of his head," 
 says Mr. Kipling of Harvey Cheyne's 
 father, who had left the boy to the care 
 of a useless wife, " that some day, when 
 he had rounded off everything and the 
 boy had left college, he would take his 
 son to his heart and lead him into his 
 possessions. Then that boy, he argued, 
 as busy fathers do, would instantly be- 
 come his companion, partner, and ally; 
 and there would follow splendid years 
 of great works carried out together, 
 the old head backing the young fire." 
 Such fatal gaps in calculation, common 
 with preoccupied fathers, are not un- 
 common with teachers, the very men 
 whose lifework is fitting boys for life. 
 
 To prepare a boy for examinations 
 that admit to college requires skill, but 
 is easy ; to prepare a boy for college is 
 a problem 'that no teacher and no school 
 has ever solved. In the widest sense, the 
 transition from school to college is almost 
 coincident with the transition from youth
 
 AND CHARACTER 129 
 
 to manhood, often a time when the 
 physical being is excitable and ill con- 
 trolled, when the mind suffers from the 
 lassitude of rapid bodily growth, and 
 when the youth's whole conception of 
 his relation to other people is distorted 
 by conceit. Sensitive to his own impor- 
 tance, just beginning to know his power 
 for good or evil, he is shot into new and 
 exciting surroundings, out of a disci- 
 pline that drove and held him with whip 
 and rein into a discipline that trusts him 
 to see the road and to travel in it. If 
 we add to this the new and alluring argu- 
 ments for vice as an expression of fully 
 developed manhood, we have some no- 
 tion of the struggle in which a boy 
 away from home, it may be, for the first 
 time is expected to conquer. The 
 best school is the school that best pre- 
 pares him for this struggle ; not the 
 school that guards him most sternly or 
 most tenderly, nor the school that guards 
 him not at all, but the school that stead-
 
 130 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 ily increases his responsibility, and as 
 steadily strengthens him to meet it The 
 best college is the college that makes 
 him a man. 
 
 The first feeling of a Freshman is 
 confusion; the next is often a strange 
 elation at the discovery that now at last 
 his elders have given him his head. " I 
 never shall forget," says a noted preacher, 
 " how I felt when I found myself a Fresh- 
 man, a feeling that all restraint was 
 gone, and that I might go to the Devil 
 just as fast as I pleased." This is the 
 transition from school to college. 
 
 In a man's life there must be, as every- 
 body knows, a perilous time of going out 
 into the world : to many it comes at the 
 beginning of a college course; to many 
 possibly to most who go to college at 
 all it has already come at school. The 
 larger and less protected boarding school 
 or academy is constantly threatened with 
 every vice known to a college ; the clois- 
 tered private school affords, from its lack
 
 AND CHARACTER 131 
 
 of opportunity for some vices, peculiar 
 temptation to others ; the day school, if 
 in or near a large city, contains boys for 
 whose bad habits, not yet revealed, their 
 parents by and by will hold the college 
 responsible. I remember a group of 
 boys going daily from cultivated homes 
 to an excellent school, each of whom, in 
 college, came to one grief or another, 
 and each of whom, I am convinced, had 
 made straight at home and at school the 
 way to that grief. The transition from 
 school to college was merely the contin- 
 uation in a larger world of what they 
 had begun in a smaller. 
 
 A continuation is what the transition 
 ought to be : the problem is how to 
 make it a continuation of the right sort. 
 "What is the matter with your col- 
 lege *? " says a teacher who cares beyond 
 all else for the moral and religious wel- 
 fare of his pupils. "I keep my boys 
 for years : I send them to you in Sep- 
 tember, and by Christmas half of them
 
 132 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 have degenerated. They have lost punc- 
 tuality ; they have lost application ; they 
 have no responsibility ; and some of them 
 are gone to the bad." "What is the 
 matter with your school," the college 
 retorts, "that in half a dozen years it 
 cannot teach a boy to stand up three 
 months ? College is the world ; fitting 
 for college is fitting for life : what is the 
 matter with your school ? " He who 
 loses his ideals loses the very bloom of 
 life. To see a young man's ideals rap- 
 idly slipping away, while his face grows 
 coarser and coarser, is one of the saddest 
 sights in college or out of it. What 
 is his training good for, if it has not 
 taught him the folly, the misery, and the 
 wrong of dabbling in evil ? If he must 
 believe that no man is wise till he has 
 come to know the resorts of gamblers 
 and harlots, and has indulged himself 
 for experience' sake in a little gentle- 
 manly vice, can he not put off the ac- 
 quaintance four years more, by the end
 
 AND CHARACTER 133 
 
 of which time he may have learned 
 some wiser way of getting wisdom? 
 Besides, in the course of those four 
 years (and the chance is better than 
 even) he may meet some girl for whose 
 sake he will be glad that his record has 
 been clean. Cannot a school which 
 closely watches its boys while their 
 characters are moulding teach them to 
 keep their heads level and their hearts 
 true, save them from the wrong that 
 never can be righted, send them to col- 
 lege and through college, faulty it must 
 be, but at least unstained ? 
 
 The main object of school and college 
 is the same, to establish character, and 
 to make that character more efficient 
 through knowledge; to make moral 
 character more efficient through mental 
 discipline. In the transition from school 
 to college, continuity of the best influ- 
 ence, mental and moral, is the thing 
 most needful. Oddly enough, the only 
 continuity worthy of the name is often
 
 134 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 (in its outward aspect) neither mental 
 nor moral, but athletic. An athlete is 
 watched at school as an athlete, enters 
 college as an athlete; and if he is a 
 good athlete, and if he takes decent care 
 of his body, he continues his college 
 course as an athlete, with new expe- 
 riences, it is true, but always with the 
 thread of continuity fairly visible, and 
 with the relation of training to success 
 clearly in view. Palpably bad as the 
 management of college athletics has 
 been and is, misleading as the predomi- 
 nance of athletics in an institution of 
 learning may be, the fact remains that 
 in athletics lies a saving power, and that 
 for many a boy no better bridge of the 
 gap between school and college has yet 
 been found. The Freshman athlete, left 
 to himself, is likely to fall behind in his 
 studies ; but unless he is singularly un- 
 reasonable or vicious, he is where an 
 older student of clear head and strong 
 will can keep him straight, can at
 
 AND CHARACTER 135 
 
 least save him from those deplorable 
 falls that, to a greater or less degree, 
 bruise and taint a whole life. "The 
 trouble will begin," said a wise man, 
 talking to sub-Freshmen, "in the first 
 fortnight. Some evening you will be 
 with a lot of friends in somebody's 
 room, when something is proposed that 
 you know is n't just right. Stop it if 
 you can ; if not, go home and go to bed, 
 and in the morning you will be glad you 
 did n't stay." The first danger in the 
 transition from boyhood to manhood is 
 the danger in what is called " knowing 
 life." It is so easy to let mere vulgar 
 curiosity pose as the search for truth. 
 A Senior who had been in a fight at a 
 public dance said in defence of himself: 
 " I think I have led a pretty clean life 
 in these four years ; but I believe that 
 going among all sorts of people and 
 knowing them is the best thing college 
 life can give us." The old poet knew 
 better :
 
 136 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 "Let no man say there, 'Virtue's flinty wall 
 Shall lock vice in me ; I '11 do none but know all.' 
 
 Men are sponges, which, to pour out, receive ; 
 Who know false play, rather than lose, deceive ; 
 
 For in best understandings sin began ; 
 
 Angels sinned first, then devils, and then man." 
 
 Here comes in to advantage the am- 
 bition of the athlete. Football begins 
 with or before the college year. Train- 
 ing for football means early hours, clean 
 life, constant occupation for body and 
 mind. Breach of training means ostra- 
 cism. That this game tides many a 
 Freshman over a great danger, by keep- 
 ing him healthily occupied, I have come 
 firmly to believe. It supplies what Pre- 
 sident Eliot calls a "new and effective 
 motive for resisting all sins which weaken 
 or corrupt the body;" it appeals to 
 ambition and to self-restraint; it gives 
 to crude youth a task in which crude 
 youth can attain finish and skill, can 
 feel the power that comes of surmount- 
 ing tremendous obstacles and of recog-
 
 AND CHARACTER 137 
 
 nition for surmounting them ; moreover, 
 like war, it affords an outlet for the reck- 
 less courage of young manhood, the 
 same reckless courage that in idle days 
 drives young men headlong into vice. 
 
 Has not hard study, also, a saving 
 power *? Yes, for some boys ; but for a 
 boy full of animal spirits, and not spurred 
 to intellectual effort by poverty, the pres- 
 sure is often too gentle, the reward too 
 remote. Such a youth may be, in the 
 first place, too well pleased with himself 
 to understand his relation to his fellow 
 men and the respectability of labor. He 
 may fail to see that college life does not 
 of itself make a man distinguished ; in 
 a vague way, he feels that the university 
 is gratefully ornamented by his presence. 
 No human creature can be more com- 
 placent than a Freshman, unless it is a 
 Sophomore : yet the Freshman may be 
 simply a being who, with no particular 
 merit of his own, has received a great 
 opportunity; and the Sophomore may
 
 138 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 be simply a being who has abused that 
 opportunity for a year. 
 
 Now the Freshman meets, in a large 
 modern college, a new theory of intel- 
 lectual discipline. As Professor Peabody 
 has beautifully expressed it, he passes 
 " from the sense of study as an obligation 
 to the sense of study as an opportunity." 
 Too often he regards study as an inferior 
 opportunity ; and having an option be- 
 tween study and loafing, he takes loafing. 
 "In the Medical School," said a first- 
 year medical student, " they give you a 
 lot to do ; and nobody cares in the least 
 whether you do it." In other words, the 
 Medical School may rely on the com- 
 bined stimulus of intellectual ambition 
 and bread and butter : its Faculty need 
 not prod or cosset ; it is a place of Devil 
 take the hindmost. Yet the change in 
 the attitude of teacher to pupil is not 
 more sharply marked between college 
 and medical school than between prepar- 
 atory school and college. " There are
 
 AND CHARACTER 139 
 
 only two ways of getting work out of 
 a boy" said a young college graduate. 
 " One is through emulation ; the other 
 is to stand behind and kick him. 1 Mr. 
 X [a well-known schoolmaster] says, 
 ' Jones, will you please do this or that ; ' 
 Mr. Y stands behind Jones and kicks 
 him into college." I do not accept the 
 young graduate's alternative ; but I have 
 to admit that many boys are kicked, or 
 whipped, or cosseted, or otherwise per- 
 sonally conducted into college, and, once 
 there, are as hopelessly lost as a baby 
 turned loose in London. " It took me 
 about two years in college to get my 
 bearings," said an earnest man, now a 
 superintendent of schools. "I didn't 
 loaf; I simply did n't know how to get 
 at things. In those days there was no- 
 body to go to for advice; and I had 
 never read anything, had never been 
 inside of a public library. I did n't 
 know where or how to take hold." 
 
 1 Both ways are known in football, besides what 
 is called " cursing up."
 
 140 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 This is the story of a man who longed 
 to take hold; and we must remember 
 that many of our college boys do not at 
 first care whether they take hold or not. 
 It is only in football, not in study, that 
 they have learned to tackle, and to tackle 
 low. " A bolstered boy," says a wise mo- 
 ther, " is an unfortunate man." Many of 
 these boys have been bolstered ; many 
 are mothers' boys; many have crammed 
 day and night through the hot season to 
 get into college, and, once in, draw a 
 long breath and lie down. The main 
 object of life is attained ; and for any 
 secondary object they are too tired to 
 work. The old time-table of morning 
 school gives place to a confusing arrange- 
 ment which spreads recitations and lec- 
 tures unevenly over the different days. 
 They walk to a large lecture room, where 
 a man who is not going to question them 
 that day talks for an hour, more or less 
 audibly. He is a long way off; 1 and 
 
 1 A student whose name begins with Y told me 
 once that he had never had a good seat in his life.
 
 AND CHARACTER 141 
 
 though he is talking to somebody, he 
 seems not to be talking to them. It is 
 hard to listen ; and if they take notes (a 
 highly educational process) the notes will 
 be poor : besides, if they need notes, they 
 can buy them later. Why not let the 
 lecture go, and sleep, or carve the furni- 
 ture, or think about something else (girls, 
 for instance) ? These boys are in a poor 
 frame of mind for new methods of in- 
 struction ; yet new methods of instruc- 
 tion they must have. They must learn 
 to depend upon themselves, to become 
 men ; and they must learn that hardest 
 lesson of all, that a man's freedom 
 consists in binding himself: still again, 
 they must learn these things at an age 
 when the average boy has an ill-seasoned 
 body, a half-trained mind, jarred nerves, 
 his first large sum of money, all manner 
 of diverting temptations, and a profound 
 sense of his own importance. How can 
 they be taken down, and not taken down 
 too much, thrown, and not thrown too
 
 142 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 hard ? How can they be taught the re- 
 sponsibility of freedom *? They face, it 
 may be, an elective system which, at first 
 sight, seems to make elective, not this or 
 that study merely, but the habit of study- 
 ing at all. Already they have been weak- 
 ened by the failure of the modern parent 
 and the modern educator to see steadily 
 the power that is born of overcoming 
 difficulties. What the mind indolently 
 shrinks from is readily mistaken, by fond 
 mothers, mercenary tutors, and some bet- 
 ter people, as not suited to the genius of 
 the boy in question. " It is too much 
 for Jamie to learn those stupid rules of 
 syntax, when he has a passion for natural 
 history ; " or, " George never could learn 
 geometry, and after all, we none of us 
 use geometry in later life. He expects 
 to be a lawyer, like his father ; and I 
 can't think of any good geometry can 
 do him." 
 
 The change "from the sense of study 
 as an obligation to the sense of study as
 
 AND CHARACTER 143 
 
 an opportunity" is a noble change for 
 persons mature enough to turn oppor- 
 tunity into obligation : it is not a noble 
 change for those who choose such studies 
 only as they think they can pass with 
 bought notes. Knowledge that does not 
 overcome difficulties, knowledge that 
 merely absorbs what it can without dis- 
 agreeable effort, is not power; it is not 
 even manly receptivity. Milton, to be 
 sure, patient toiler and conqueror though 
 he was, cried in his pain, " God loves not 
 to plough out the heart of our endeavors 
 with overhard and sad tasks : " but an 
 overhard and sad task may be a plain 
 duty ; and even Milton, when he said 
 this, was trying to get rid of what some 
 people would call a plain duty, his 
 wife. When we consider the mass and 
 the variety of the Freshmen's tempta- 
 tions, and what some one has called the 
 " strain on their higher motives," we 
 wonder more and more at the strength of 
 the temptation to knowledge, whereby so
 
 144 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 many stand steady, and work their way 
 out into clear-headed and trustworthy 
 manhood. 
 
 One way to deal with these strange, 
 excited, inexperienced, and intensely hu- 
 man things called Freshmen is to let thern 
 flounder till they drown or swim ; and 
 this way has been advocated by men who 
 have no boys of their own. It is de- 
 lightfully simple, if we can only shut eye 
 and ear and heart and conscience ; and 
 it has a kind of plausibility in the ex- 
 amples of men who through rough usage 
 have achieved strong character. " The 
 objection," as the master of a great school 
 said the other day, " is the waste ; and," 
 he added, " it is such an awful thing to 
 waste human life ! " This method is a 
 cruel method, ignoring all the sensibili- 
 ties of that delicate, high-strung instru- 
 ment which we call the soul. If none 
 but the fittest survived, the cruelty might 
 be defended ; but some, who unhappily 
 cannot drown, become cramped swim-
 
 AND CHARACTER 145 
 
 mers for all their days. Busy and worn 
 as a college teacher usually is, thirsty 
 for the advancement of learning as he 
 is assumed always to be, he cannot let 
 hundreds of young men pass before him, 
 unheeded and unfriended. At Harvard 
 College, the Faculty, through its system 
 of advisers for Freshmen, has made a 
 beginning : and though there are hardly 
 enough advisers to go round, the system 
 has proved its usefulness. At Harvard 
 College, also, a large committee of 
 Seniors and Juniors has assumed some 
 responsibility for all the Freshmen. Each 
 undertakes to see at the beginning of 
 the year the Freshmen assigned to him, 
 and to give every one of them, besides 
 kindly greeting and good advice, the 
 feeling that an experienced undergradu- 
 ate may be counted on as a friend in 
 need. 
 
 Whether colleges should guard their 
 students more closely than they do 
 whether, for example, they should with
 
 146 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 
 
 gates and bars protect their dormitories 
 against the inroads of bad women is 
 an open question. For the deliberately 
 vicious such safeguards would amount 
 to nothing ; but for the weak they might 
 lessen the danger of sudden temptation. 
 Of what schools should do I can say 
 little ; for with schools I have little expe- 
 rience : but this I know, that some sys- 
 tem of gradually increased responsibility 
 is best in theory, and has proved good in 
 practice. The scheme of making the 
 older and more influential boys " pre- 
 fects" has worked well in at least one 
 large preparatory school, and shows its 
 excellence in the attitude of the prefects 
 when they come to college. This scheme 
 makes a confident appeal to the maturity 
 of some boys and the reasonableness of 
 all, trusting all to see that the best hopes 
 of teacher and scholar are one and the 
 same. 
 
 The system of gradually increased
 
 AND CHARACTER 147 
 
 responsibility at school must be met half- 
 way by the system of friendly supervision 
 at college, supervision in which the 
 older undergraduates are quite as impor- 
 tant as the Faculty. The Sophomore who 
 enjoys hazing (like the dean who em- 
 ploys spies) is an enemy to civilization. 
 The true state of mind, whether for pro- 
 fessor or for student, was expressed by 
 a college teacher long ago. " I hold it," 
 he said, " a part of my business to do 
 what I can for any wight that comes to 
 this place." When all students of all 
 colleges, and all boys of all schools, be- 
 lieve, and have the right to believe, that 
 their teachers are their friends ; when 
 the educated public recognizes the truth 
 that school and college should help each 
 other in lifting our youth to the high 
 ground of character, the school never 
 forgetting that boys are to be men, and 
 the college never forgetting that men 
 have been boys, we shall come to the
 
 148 CHARACTER 
 
 ideal of education. Toward this ideal we 
 are moving, slowly but steadily. When 
 we reach it, or even come so near it as 
 to see it always, we shall cease to dread 
 the transition from school to college.
 
 Che ttilirrsi&r press 
 
 Eltctrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 
 Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
 
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