FROM THE SCHOOL TO THE GIRL
What the school is able to do for the girl depends very largely upon the girl herself. The majority of people with whom she comes in contact do not take that into consideration, and the school is held unfairly responsible for the girl. All any school can do is to use the material it finds. Some one has said, with harsh but true emphasis, that a college does not make a fool, it simply helps in the development of one. As an illustration of its limitations, a school sends out two girls from the same class; one girl it is proud to have taken as a type, the other it is sorry to have represent it. Yet both have been under exactly the same influence. Students do not realize how fearfully at their mercy a school is, or that, so far as reputation is concerned, it is they who make or mar its credit.
If the school training is worth anything at all, it makes the most of unpromising material. Its really discouraging experience is not with the girl of limited ability who gives her best and so in some sense gets the best, but with the student who doesn't give her best and who, because of her own indifference, is always misrepresenting the training she is receiving. No school ever wishes to have its ideals confused by a vulgar display of wealth or by loud or conspicuous behaviour. Yet many a school, with ideals all that they should be, is misjudged in public places because of some thoughtless or unreliable girls. This doesn't seem like fair-play or team-play, does it? The fineness of life ought to be felt and expressed in student behaviour. Yet how often it is not!
Another way in which the ideals of a school or college are misrepresented is by lack of intellectual integrity. Any school informed with a large spirit wishes to meet its students on a platform of absolute trust,—a platform which makes precautions against dishonesty unnecessary. Just so long as a school must be vigilant in order to keep a few students from unfair behaviour, just so long is it prevented from meeting them all on a basis of absolute trust. Why should girls excuse themselves for classroom dishonesty? What would they think of a girl who cheated in basket-ball? Would they condone that? Until student government has recognized absolute intellectual integrity as a part of its ideas, it will not have achieved its end. The rock on which all scholarship is founded is honour. Lack of honour is fatal to its ideal. "Cribbing," often excused by people who do not stop to think, is the small beginning of a big evil.
Many a large institution is like an anxious mother, not always infallible in wisdom, but personally interested in and eager for the success of the individual. A successful girl brings credit to her school, for she demonstrates, as nothing else can, the fact that the school is achieving its purpose in service to the community. How much this encouragement is needed, girls do not realize, for they do not know all the difficulties which institutions, especially technical and collegiate, have to meet in sending their students out into the world. In finding a position for a student, the school has to consider the whole girl. It may care greatly for an attractive personality and yet see that its possessor is lacking in qualities of faithfulness and accuracy, and that with its utmost endeavour it has never been able to correct these faults. On the other hand, the school may have those students whose manners, whose dress, whose personality, whose spelling, whose awkwardly expressed notes, whose lack of promptness, make against success in any capacity.
Another point for which the school looks in recommending its students is physical fitness, which shows itself in many different ways: in voice, in carriage, in attractiveness, in staying power. One teacher who had an excellent record as a student and was, besides, a fine girl, had so unpleasant and absurd a voice that her students were in a continual state of amusement and would learn nothing from her. A great many teachers have lost in power because of a poor voice, strident, or lifeless, or husky, or falsetto. A poor enunciation, or words that do not carry, are ineffectual means by which to reach a class, to hold a customer, or to introduce one's self favourably to the interest of others. For a girl who is going to have any part in public life—and most girls do nowadays—a good voice is an absolute essential. And it is well for us to remember that the voice is not something superficial, but that it is the expression of that which is within.
Another way in which physical fitness shows itself is in the carriage. A girl who carries herself with erectness and energy brings a certain conviction with her of fitness for many things, of self-respect, of ability, and reveals in her bearing something of her mind as well as of her body. We are always tempted to think a person who "slumps" physically may slump in other ways. A good carriage, good voice, and strong, clean, digestive system are far more important than beauty of features.
There is another matter at which the school in placing its students must look. To be a desirable candidate for a good position a girl need not be expensively gowned, but she must be daintily and freshly dressed. Immaculate shirt waist, a plain, well-made skirt, with good shoes, stockings and gloves and a quiet, pretty hat, are all any woman needs in meeting her business obligations. And that daintiness which she shows in her dress she must show in her person too, in clean skin and finger-nails, good teeth, and smooth, attractively arranged hair.
It is very important for the interests of a school, as well as for the individual, to place its students advantageously. To have them succeed widens its sphere of usefulness and influence and opens new channels of service. Every college puts itself to considerable expense in looking out for the interests of its students, for the glory of a great school lies not only in the people whom it collects into its midst, but even more in those whom it sends out. A girl has no right to go so lightly through her school life that she fails to see in it all the self-sacrifice and effort and ambitions that have gone into the building up of what is her privilege and opportunity. In so far as she does this she fails in the team-play spirit. Why should a girl think that she can spend her father's money, or the means of her school, thoughtlessly? What would happen to her if she did this with the funds of her basket-ball team? Yet girls waste the resources of their school by carelessness with its property, a carelessness that collectively mounts up into thousands of dollars, and never once stop to think how difficult every big school finds it to make ends meet.
Before it is too late, at least now that she is leaving school, let her stop to realize that a great deal of the work for an institution is along the line of self-sacrifice, in the gifts given, in the work of its administrators and teachers. This unselfishness means a financial loss, for business ability might be invested in more lucrative ways; it means a social sacrifice, for there is a certain kind of impersonality which is demanded in work that deals with a continually changing community; it means risk in the great strain put upon physical and nervous strength; it means forgetting one's self; for the true teacher is willing to be forgotten when she has served others. What a school may accomplish for its students is its only compensation for all this self-sacrifice.