I do not mean life at a boarding-school. If I speak of that, it is to be at another time. No, I mean life at a regular every-day school, in town or in the country, where you go in the morning and come away at eleven or at noon, and go again in the afternoon, and come away after two or three hours. Some young people hate this life, and some like it tolerably well. I propose to give some information which shall make it more agreeable all round.
And I beg it may be understood that I do not appear as counsel for either party, in the instruction and advice I give. That means that, as the lawyers say, I am not retained by the teachers, formerly called schoolmistresses and schoolmasters, or by the pupils, formerly called boys and girls. I have been a schoolmaster myself, and I enjoyed the life very much, and made among my boys some of the best of the friends of my life. I have also been a school-boy,--and I roughed through my school life with comparative comfort and ease. As master and as boy I learned some things which I think can be explained to boys and girls now, so as to make life at school easier and really more agreeable.
My first rule is, that you
Accept The Situation.
Perhaps you do not know what that means. It means that, as you are at school, whether you really like going or not, you determine to make the very best you can of it, and that you do not make yourself and everybody else wretched by sulking and grumbling about it, and wishing school was done, and wondering why your father sends you there, and asking leave to look at the clock in the other room, and so on.
When Dr. Kane or Captain McGlure was lying on a skin on a field of ice, in a blanket bag buttoned over his head, with three men one side of him and three the other, and a blanket over them all,--with the temperature seventy-eight degrees below zero, and daylight a month and a half away, the position was by no means comfortable. But a brave man does not growl or sulk in such a position. He "accepts the situation." That is, he takes that as a thing for granted, about which there is to be no further question. Then he is in condition to make the best of it, whatever that best may be. He can sing "We won't go home till morning," or he can tell the men the story of William Fitzpatrick and the Belgian coffee-grinder, or he can say "good-night" and imagine himself among the Kentish hop-fields,--till before he knows it the hop-sticks begin walking round and round, and the haycocks to make faces at him,--and--and--and--he--he --he is fast asleep. That comfort comes of "accepting the situation."
Now here you are at school, I will say, for three hours. Accept the situation, like a man or a woman, and do not sulk like a fool. As Mr. Abbot says, in his admirable rule, in Rollo or Jonas, "When you grant, grant cheerfully." You have come here to school without a fight, I suppose. When your father told you to come, you did not insult him, as people do in very poor plays and very cheap novels. You did not say to him, "Miscreant and villain, I renounce thee, I defy thee to the teeth; I am none of thine, and henceforth I leave thee in thy low estate." You did not leap in the middle of the night from a three-story window, with your best clothes in a handkerchief, and go and assume the charge of a pirate clipper, which was lying hidden in a creek in the Back Bay. On the contrary, you went to school when the time came. As you have done so, determine, first of all, to make the very best of it. The best can be made first-rate. But a great deal depends on you in making it so.
To make the whole thing thoroughly attractive, to make the time pass quickly, and to have school life a natural part of your other life, my second rule is,
Do What You Do With All Your Might.
It is a good rule in anything; in sleeping, in playing, or in whatever you have in hand. But nothing tends to make school time pass quicker; and the great point, as I will acknowledge, is to get through with the school hours as quickly as we fairly can.