A School of Struggle
Dr. Henry Solomon Lehr, founder of the Ohio Northern University at Ada, Ohio, one of Ohio's greatest educators, used to say with pride, "Our students come to school; they are not sent."
He encouraged his students to be self-supporting, and most of them were working their way thru school. He made the school calendar and courses elastic to accommodate them. He saw the need of combining the school of books with the school of struggle. He organized his school into competing groups, so that the student who had no struggle in his life would at least have to struggle with the others during his schooling.
He pitted class against class. He organized great literary and debating societies to compete with each other. He arranged contests for the military department. His school was one surging mass of contestants. Yet each student felt no compulsion. Rather he felt that he was initiating an individual or class effort to win. The literary societies vied with each other in their programs and in getting new members, going every term to unbelievable efforts to win over the others. They would go miles out on the trains to intercept new students, even to their homes in other states. Each old student pledged new students in his home country. The military companies turned the school into a military camp for weeks each year, scarcely sleeping while drilling for a contest flag.
Those students went out into the world trained to struggle. I do not believe there is a school in America with a greater alumni roll of men and women of uniformly greater achievement.
I believe the most useful schools today are schools of struggle schools offering encouragement and facilities for young people to work their way thru and to act upon their own initiative.