Read Ebook: A Girl's Student Days and After by Marks Jeannette Augustus Woolley Mary Emma Commentator

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THE GIRL AND THE SCHOOL

Inside school or college the girl is in several ways responsible for the atmosphere. Merely in her conversation she can be of service or dis-service. It may be simply a good joke which she is telling, but if the joke misrepresents the school she will, perhaps, do lasting harm. If she is hypercritical--and there is nothing so contagious as criticism--she influences people in the direction of her thought; she sets a current of criticism in motion. A student frequently gives vent to an opinion that is only half-baked--it is well, by the way, to make zwieback of all our opinions before we pass them around as edible--about courses and instructors. She does not realize that some opinions to be worth anything must be the result of a long process of baking, that a nibble from the corner of a four months' or nine months' course will not, however understandingly it may be Fletcherized, tell you whether the course is going to be fruit cake, meringue or common soda crackers. She may think that she herself is so unimportant that what she says can't matter, or she may not mean what she says and be merely letting off steam. Nevertheless her influence is exerted. Some one showed an old lady, who had never been known to say anything in the least critical of any human being, the picture of a very fat man prominent in public life. She looked at it a moment, and then said sweetly: "My, isn't he plump!" If only there were more old and young ladies like that dear soul!

There is another kind of conversation which may not be ill-natured and yet does harm. Idle gossiping, talking about things that are not worth while or speculating about affairs which are not our business and of which we know little or nothing. Akin to this is fashionably slangy conversation concerning the latest thing in books, magazine articles, trivial plays. For even the "tone" of school or college conversation a student is responsible. She can make her school seem cheap or cultivated. The remarks which visitors overhear as they go from room to room or from building to building are likely to indicate the "tone" of an institution. A catalogue may say all it pleases about a school but in the end the school is judged by the women it educates and sends out, even as a tree is known by its fruit. Cultivated, strong women are worth more in advertisement than all the printed material in the world, however laudatory.

When a girl has received everything her Alma Mater has to give, she has no right to be untrue to its fundamental aims and ideals, or to misrepresent it in any way, either by what she says or by her own behaviour. Every student in a large institution is in a sense a pensioner. No student can pay for what is given to her. Is it not a poor return for her to be reflecting dishonour rather than honour upon her school?

There is a certain social selfishness in the way some students take their opportunities for granted without realizing that there are thousands and hundreds of thousands of girls who would give all that they possess for a tithe of such riches. Also, because of the sacrifice which is being made for them at home girls are selfish in taking their school or college life carelessly. The school has to bear much of the responsibility for the individual failure. But of this the student who is failing rarely thinks. Parents hold an institution to blame if it does not do for their child what they expect it to do, when it may be the girl who is at fault.

While she is still in school the girl discharges part of this obligation by realizing what is best for her school as an institution. A college or a big school is no place for vocal soloists. Its life is the life of an orchestra, of many instruments playing together. The student's sense of responsibility is shown by her attitude towards the corporate government and administration of the school. Instead of regarding the laws of her school as natural enemies, chafing against them, making fun of them or evading them if possible, she has a duty in fulfilling them. The consciousness of this responsibility is the very heart and soul of the student self-government movement, for it recognizes not only the obligation placed upon its members by an institution, but also the wide influence one girl may have on others. Student government knows that upper class girls can determine the spirit of the under classes. Even looking at the matter from the lightest point of view, respectful and law-abiding ways are always well-bred ways.

The school considers not only scholarship but also the sum of all that it is, its culture, its attainment, its moral force, as these elements are expressed in its living members, its students and its teachers--in short, its idealism. Idealism is having one's life governed by ideals, and an ideal is a perfect conception of that which is good, beautiful and true. If the girl's life is not governed by ideals, how, then, can the school hope to have its idealism live or grow? Frequently students think of the ideals of college or school as of something outside themselves, more or less intangible, with which they may or may not be concerned. Students cannot do their institution a greater injury than by harbouring such a thought, for if their sense of responsibility will only make the idea of the school personal, then indeed will the school be like that house upon which the rains descended and the winds blew but it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock.

FRIENDSHIPS

Homesickness and friendships, how much and how vivid a part they play in the first year, or years, of school life! An old coloured physician was asked about a certain patient who was very ill. "I'll tell you de truf," was the reply. "Widout any perception, Phoebe Pamela may die and she may get well; dere's considerable danger bofe ways." I will tell you one truth about the first year of school life: friends there will surely be, and homesickness there is likely to be,--there is "considerable danger both ways."

Many temptations follow in the wake of homesickness, and the most serious of all is to make friends too rapidly. It may be laid down as a rule that a friendship formed on this stop-gap principle, and too rapidly, is not likely to endure. Such a friendship is not a sane or a wise relation, for friendship is like scholarship: if it is worth anything at all it comes slowly. Impulsive, quickly forced friendships are not wise investments; the very fact that they come so quickly implies an unbalanced state of idealizing, or lack of self-control. This does not mean that one is not to form pleasant acquaintances from the very beginning of the school life. Acquaintanceship always holds something in reserve and is the safest prelude to a deeper and more vital friendship.

There is no denying that there is great temptation to violent admirations and attractions in school. In the first place, in school or college the girl is brought into contact with a large circle of people who are immensely interesting to her. The whole atmosphere is full of novelty, of the unusual. Some of the students and teachers whom she meets for the first time represent a broader experience, it may be, than her own home life has given her. They are often new types and new types are always interesting.

I shall say nothing of the idealism of friendship--it plays its part in other books. It would seem sometimes as if almost too much emphasis had been placed upon the making of friendships in school,--friendship which is, after all, but a by-product, the most valuable it is true, nevertheless a by-product of the life. Wholly practical are the tests of friendship which I shall give. In the first place a friend is too absorbing who takes all of one's interest to the exclusion of everything else: there should be interest in other people, other activities as well as in one's work. Such a friendship can only make a girl forget for what she has come to school. The new relation which disposes one to look with less respect and affection upon one's own people and home--and they, be it remembered, have stood the most valuable test of all, the test of time--cannot be a good influence. It may be said in general that an association which is developing the less fine traits in one's character, giving emphasis to the less worthy sides, should be relinquished immediately, even at the cost of much heartache. The heartache will be only temporary; the bad influence might become permanent. On the other hand, since friendship is giving as well as taking, one does well to consider the fact that if one's own part in it does not tell for good, there is just as much reason for stopping the friendship where it is. Some of these associations--and this is a hard saying, I know--which seem everything at the time are nothing, as the years will prove. A girl idealizes, and idealizes those who are not worthy. Inevitably the day comes when she laughs at herself,--if she does not do worse and pity herself for having been such a goose.

Only a few of the friendships made in school are destined to endure. One of the foremost of those that last is founded on similarity of interest. Perhaps it is the girl with whom one has worked side by side in the laboratory,--a relation formed slowly and on a permanent basis. Many of the best of friends have come together through community of interests, and this is a type of friendship for which men have a greater gift than women.

There is still another type which develops because of some conspicuously noble or fine quality which proves attractive. Hero worship, this, which enlarges one's self through the admiration given to another. Then there is the friendship based on a purely personal attraction, with mutual respect and self-respect as its dedicated corner-stone. This does not mean that one cannot see any faults in the friend, or know that one's own are seen, without losing affection. There is always something flimsy and insecure about a friendship that simply idealizes. Any relation should be all the stronger for a frank acknowledgment of its imperfections. If a girl cares enough she will be willing to admit her own faults and wish to make herself more worthy to be a friend.

And, finally, there is what might be called the lend-a-hand friendship,--the relation that springs into existence because of the need which is seen in another. It is not fair to make a packhorse of one's friend or to turn one's self into the leaning variety of plant, but it is fair and wise and right, if one is strong enough to accomplish the end in view, to lend a hand to another girl who is not making the best of herself.

Have a good time but do not swear eternal allegiance in this first year to anybody, however wonderful she may seem. Hold yourself in reserve, if for no other reason, then on account of the old friends at home, whether they be kin or no-kin, for they have been true. And remember, as I have said before, friendship is like scholarship and must by its nature come slowly.

THE STUDENT'S ROOM

There has been a general improvement in student rooms, yet many rooms to-day have altogether too much in them: too many pictures, too many banners, too much furniture, too many hangings. The great fault of most rooms is this overcrowding. If we were only heroic enough to make a bonfire of nine-tenths of all they contain we should see suddenly revealed possibilities for something like the ideal room.

One serious and obvious objection to the overcrowding of rooms is the hygienic. I am tempted to say that this is the most important objection: indeed, since health is more important than wealth, I will say so. A girl has neither the time nor the ability to keep so many articles in a room clean: and while she is busy attending to her studies, some cherished ornaments are not only laying up dust for the future, as a more regenerate life will lay up treasures, but also breeding germs, perhaps collecting the very germs which will take this girl away from school or college. Besides, bric-?-brac not only gathers dust and breeds germs but also wearies the nerves. It makes one tired to see so many things about, and tired to be held responsible for them. Without realizing it, we resist the amount of space they occupy and in their place want the air and sunshine. Subconsciously, most of us long to get rid of our bric-?-brac and then pull down the draperies that keep out the sunlight. The simpler the window draperies in a room, the more easily washed, the better and more attractive. For wholesome attractiveness there is no fabric that can excel a flood of warm sunshine. Any girl or woman who has curtains which she must protect from strong light by drawing down the shades is guilty of a household sin whose greatness she cannot know. That same sunshine, freely admitted, will do more to cleanse a house than all the soap, all the brooms, and even all the vacuum cleaners ever invented.

The so-called beauty of a room should always give way before the hygiene of a room. Not only should the room be sensibly furnished so that it may have plenty of air and light, but closets should not contain articles of furniture which belong where the air can reach them. There is a difference between a room that is not orderly and one that is not clean. A room that contains unclean articles in drawers or closets, unclean floors, unclean rugs and hangings and unclean walls, should not be tolerated for an instant. If a girl turns a combination bedroom and study in school or college into a kitchen, if an ice-cream freezer occupies all the foreground of this place she calls home, and chafing-dishes with cream bottles, sardine tins, cracker boxes, paper bags full of stale biscuits, fruit skins, dish-cloths and grease-spotted walls, all the background, it is impossible to have a clean room to live in.

The Golden Rule applies to rooms as well as to human beings and should read, "Do unto a room as you would it should do unto you." And not only for the sake of health should this Golden Rule for Rooms be observed but also for the sake of the college or school. The room that belongs to us only for a time should be as thoughtfully cared for as if it were our own personal property. There is something inconsistent, isn't there, in educating a girl in high thinking and fine ideals, if she is willing to live in a room that for uncleanliness many a woman in some crowded quarter of a city would consider a disgrace? Such contradiction in mind and surrounding is out of harmony with all one's ideal for a gentlewoman.

Not only beauty is restful, peace-giving and peace-bringing, but so, also, are neatness and order. Orderliness helps to fit one for work. There is undoubtedly some connection between surroundings and one's mental state. In themselves disorder and confusion are irritating. The sight of a dirty child crying in the doorway of an untidy house suggests some connection between the wretchedness of the child and the squalor of the home. I often think of William Morris, the great craftsman and charming poet, who had much at heart the happiness of all people, especially the poor, and his exclamation, "My eye, how I do love tidiness!" To him, to the artist, it was, as it is, beautiful. George Eliot had to put even the pins in her cushion into some neat arrangement before she could sit down to write. Disorder wastes not only one's feelings and health, it also wastes one's time, for a lot of this commodity may be lost in looking for books, wraps, gloves and other things which are not put away properly.

School ought to be a training for the life afterwards. That is why we go to school, isn't it? Why should a girl indulge herself in habits which will make against her usefulness in the life of the home or in whatever circumstance she may be? There is a certain disciplinary value in order. Every great military school has recognized this. Laxness in the care of one's room may mean the habit of laxness in other and more important ways. Disorderliness indicates a certain tendency in character, and if a girl allows that sort of thing to go on she is very likely to show it in other ways. Untidiness in any of one's personal habits--and what could be more personal than a room?--should be taken up and corrected even as one attempts to correct any weak point in one's character.

Do you know what is always--that is, if it is in it at all--the most beautiful thing in a room? It is something which the Creator meant all mankind should have, rich and poor, old and young alike; it is something beyond the buying price of any wealth. It is the sunshine, more beautiful, more valuable than expensive hangings that shut it out. Perhaps it is partly because it is inexpensive, God-given to all people, that housewives frequently draw their curtains against it. If they had to pay more for it than for carpets and hangings, you may be very sure that a great many husbands and fathers would be overworking in order that their families might buy a whole display of sunshine instead of tapestries.

Take the gaudy ambitious study one girl has made for herself. It is defaced by the presence of articles of no value at all in the world of needs; there is nothing in it that is genuinely beautiful and nothing that is substantially useful. The furniture is almost too cheap to stand on its own legs, and the colours would certainly never wash and not even wear. This room is a junk-shop of new, useless, unattractive objects of no virtue,--in short, a most unpleasant place in which to live. Have you ever considered what gives even the simplest clothes for distinctive occasions a beauty of their own? It is fitness. And it is this same fitness which tells so much in furnishing a room. It might be said of certain dresses that they "go together," that is, they are harmonious, they belong together, they have, like some people, the beauty of agreeing with themselves, and a very desirable sort of beauty it is. Just as clothes are an expression of the people who wear them, so are rooms an expression of the people who live in them. No well-bred girl cares for tawdry, cheap, over-ornamented clothes. She is made uncomfortable even at the very thought of having to wear such things. She should suffer just as much discomfort on the score of a cheaply furnished , overcrowded and over-ornamented study.

What is the meaning of the room which is your school centre for the time being? It is an intimate place where a girl may have her friends and good times; it is a retreat and it is a workshop. It is the girl's home centre away from home, the place from which she will lead her life, in its expression attractive or unattractive, like her or unlike her. To intend that this room in beauty, in cleanliness, in order, shall be the best expression possible of the girl's best self is the ideal to set for the school study.

Get good materials and good colours. They need not be expensive. Remember that colours have to go together just as furniture has to do so. To have styles of furniture that clash or colours that do not harmonize will negative any care which the student may have taken in the selection of individual pieces or materials. To have too much with which to fill the room is a good deal worse than not to have enough. Much better it is to have a few things which are just what they should be than to have too many and those undesirable. To get a desk, if a girl can afford to do so, that she will be glad to keep her life long is a good beginning, and a comfortable chair that will be made doubly precious by all the school associations woven about it. And let her be careful about pictures for her walls and not crowd them with cheap and "fashionable" trash. Above all, let her remember that good taste, simplicity, careful selection, will do more to assure her the possession of an attractive room than all the money in the world can do.

THE TOOLS OF STUDY AND THEIR USE

And now what are the uses of the work which these tools can accomplish for us? Coleridge wrote in his poem, "Work Without Hope,"

"Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an object cannot live."

The only hope that can last is hope that is not wholly centred in ourselves, but has some thought for others and our service to them. Work devoid of inspiration and ideals, work done merely for one's self, study pursued with only a degree as an end or for the sake of "pay" as a teacher, turns school and college into a market-place, a place of barter, where in exchange for so much energy and so much money we may acquire a certain position and livelihood. Only that work in which one has the consciousness of being, or becoming, useful to others, brings joy that will endure. What do we think of the minister who is without a sense of consecration? The responsibility of the student or the teacher is quite as large, the opportunity for service quite as wonderful. One of our greatest English poets, William Wordsworth, exclaimed: "I wish to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing!" The calling of the teacher, of the student, has through all time been thought a high one,--one that has drawn to itself fine and unselfish spirits. The life of the student, no matter how necessary to the world its market-places are, never has been and never can be a life of barter, of trade.

The wealth that comes to the student should not be an exclusive possession. It may be bought at a large price but it can never be sold. It must be given away, or shared, for it is wealth which carries with it a sense of social responsibility. It is enjoyed for a double purpose, not only for the sake of the happiness it brings to us but also for the sake of the joy or help it may bring to others. Millions of girls covet the opportunities that come to a few in school and college, many of them who far more greatly deserve this privilege than we. Indeed, what have most of us done to merit the right to all that we have? The only way in which we can show our sense of justice is by taking our privileges as something to share with others. The girl who has health, pleasant surroundings and work worth doing, has all a human being has a right to expect. She ought always to be happy, always rejoicing in her work and always eager to divide her wealth with others.

THE JOY OF WORK

But the highest power of which human beings are possessed is not the power of the body. It is the power of the mind. Yet many of us throughout our school and college life not only do not wish to use this power but even rebel against it. "What," some girls are saying to themselves, "enjoy the work of a classroom? Who ever heard of such a thing!" Yes, just that. And if we don't enjoy the work of a classroom, even an indifferently good one, there is something the matter with us, or the subject should not have a place on any curriculum. Every mental exercise should be full of the keenest pleasure, of intellectual pleasure.

Our schools and colleges to-day are very much richer in the joy of everything else--in beautiful surroundings, in freer and fuller athletic and outdoor life, in a more varied and delightful social life--than they were fifty or even twenty-five years ago. But it is a question whether the joy of intellectual work has kept pace with this joy of life in its other aspects. Sometimes it almost seems as if intellectual eagerness were in inverse ratio to the ease and fullness of the opportunities we have. At least many fair-minded girls have seen the predicament in which the teacher is placed. The man who makes a vase for the use and pleasure of others may rejoice not only in his own workmanship but also in the thought of the service and delight he is giving to others. That is, his pleasure is twofold. The teacher who is deprived of some response of joy in the work he is doing is a workman deprived of his rights. To those girls who are thinking of becoming teachers this should be a sobering thought.

Missionary teachers, with their students eager to get anything they have to give, are not to be pitied. Our schools and their groups of teachers in isolated and uncultivated parts of the West and South are not to be pitied. Even if education is with them shorn of much that gives it charm, the opportunities that come are prized. Students and teachers have intellectual joy in the work they do, and without that the greatest university in the world might as well, or better, be a district school, for then the work done would be truly useful. It is the teacher who has to put much of her time and energy into making a subject superficially attractive enough for a student to elect it, who is to be pitied. A classroom full of blas? girls whose minds need to be tickled before there is the least expression of intellectual mirth upon their faces, is an ordeal not lightly to be met except by the professional joker or academic tumbler.

Girls often become impatient with themselves, and that is one reason why there is so little joy in work for them. Think of Helen Keller as a famous example of this joy in work under the most adverse circumstances. What could be greater than her handicap? Shut away from the world by deaf ears and blind eyes and, for a while, by inability to speak, she has nevertheless shown a keenness of pleasure and intellectual acquisition that shames us who have all our senses in their fullness. Think of her patient, unremitting delving, of the digging up, up, up to get to the light which most human beings are privileged to enjoy with no effort at all! The mind that accepts this wealth with no thought, no sense of responsibility, is a trifler with riches that are about us for God-given purposes. Think of the way in which Stevenson and John Richard Green and George Eliot rose above their ill-health and did their work in despite of it! Perhaps some of us have superb health and have never made any conscious effort to use that gift for a high end.

Girls grow impatient with themselves when they wouldn't be impatient with a little child. Yet the mind has to be trained even as we train a child; it has to be brought back and back, again and again to the thing to be done. After the asking of a simple question, oftentimes a whole class will look confounded, because they have some strange notion that thinking means getting hold of something very far away and difficult to grasp. All that the first effort in thought denotes is taking a hold of that which is nearest and following it up. It is the old story of Theseus following his clue of thread, the slender thing in his hand, by which he was guided out of the labyrinth and to the broad sea of adventure.

There are difficulties in the doing of any work that is worth while. It would be a poor adviser who painted the student's way as a path of roses. First and foremost, one's own inertia interferes with the joy of work. Some one has defined the lazy man as one who doesn't want to do anything at all, and the indolent man as one who doesn't want to do anything that he doesn't want to do. Then, too, there are certain allurements and distractions in school life which are a hindrance to our joy in an intellectual task. And there is the very natural disinclination to the drudgery involved in all hard labour. No work that is worth while is without drudgery. Lack of encouragement from older people is one serious difficulty some girls have to meet. There is a type of older person who is sure that using the mind will harm that precious article. And, finally, there is our inexperience, our own lack of comprehension, our own purposeless and formless lives.

Joy in work should not be altogether conditional upon one's sense of ease or upon what is called success. Seeming success is not always success. Often the most valuable lessons come from failures. Robert Browning, the poet, speaks again and again of the noble uses of failure. Let me quote one stanza from one of his greatest poems, "Rabbi Ben Ezra":

"Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! Be our joys three-parts pain! Strive and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"

You can't learn to walk if you haven't tumbled down a good deal in doing it. It is often failure that means ultimate success. Of course if a girl keeps on saying: "Oh, what's the use?" about everything she does and all her failures, there isn't any use. In weak moments that sort of thing can be said of every great and worth-while experience, of love, of joy, of sorrow, of work. But a girl who allows herself to take this attitude is a "quitter," and doesn't know the first principles of playing the game.

Part of the joy of work consists in the mere delight of intellectual exercise, delight in thinking a thing out. That is the way we develop ourselves mentally, just as we develop ourselves physically through sports. The mind that thinks is capable of deeper and broader thinking. Thinking begets thought. A muscle that is left without exercise softens and finally atrophies. The same is true of mental muscle. If this strength is left unused it is gradually lost and cannot be recovered. Mental concentration, the thought that is so strenuous that everything else is shut out, strengthens the mind. In this wonderful old world no new land has been discovered without physical effort. There is no country of the mind which can be entered without a similar effort.

And there is another and very important joy in work--the sense that one is being equipped for the work of the world, for usefulness. The mere feeling that one's powers are being developed brings joy with it. There is still another joy which every one of us must covet--the sense of entering into the intellectual riches of the world, its wonders of science and art and letters, with the feeling that we have a part in a great treasure, a treasure which, unlike gold and precious stones, men have never been able to gauge or to exhaust. Such gold and silver as we take from that adventure cannot be lost or stolen from us. It remains with us to the very last, and with it no life can ever become really poor, or dull, or old.

FAIR-PLAY

Few students realize how closely a classroom resembles a commonwealth. To most of us it seems a place into which we go to have a certain amount got out of us, or put into us. This conception of the classroom is unworthy the modern girl who has, otherwise, a fine understanding of the meaning of team-play, of playing all together for a common end, a game or a republic united by a tacit compact.

Does the average student feel responsibility for the game of basket-ball or lawn hockey which she is playing? The first thought of the girl in answering this is that it was a foolish question even to ask. Of course she does. But for her classroom? No, that is a different sort of game, in which the responsibility lies all on the shoulders of the instructor. It is a one-woman or a one-man game, and very often the students are but spectators, cheering or indifferent, approving or disapproving. The pupil does not hold herself accountable for this game; it is the teacher who makes the class "go," who extracts from each student the information bottled up in her, together, often, with a good deal of carbon dioxide,--a process difficult and hard as drawing a swollen cork out of a soda-water bottle. Finally, with a sort of noble rebound of effort, the exhausted instructor is to put a vast deal of information back into the girl before the student claps her book together and rushes pell-mell to the next classroom, there to be similarly uncorked, if the teacher has learned the art and her mental muscle is sufficient.

Such a conception of a classroom is not fair-play. The teacher, like the coxswain of a college crew, may have rowed over the same course and she may know it well enough to cover it in the dark; she may have won distinction upon it, may be the fittest person in all the states of the Union to cover it again, but if she has not a good or a winning crew to coach, she will never win any race, even the shortest. No instructor has shoulders equal to such a multiple burden as coaching, steering and doing all the rowing, too. To play any classroom game in this spirit is to be dead weight for every one else embarked upon the same adventure. It is not fair-play.

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