Often a girl thinks only of what she will do with her own summer without thinking of what she will do with her mother's or her father's summer. For nine or ten months they have been thinking of what they could do for her. Sometimes girls do not realize the actual need of help and of companionship which those at home feel, and the older people are too unselfish to force this need upon their juniors. Between the unselfishness of those who are older and the self-centredness of those who are younger, there is often sad havoc made in a home. A girl who, after a year's absence and all that has been done for her, can't adjust herself to those who need her, has still something to learn.
If older people cannot do without the buoyancy of the young, the young cannot very well afford to forget the mother and father who have much, although no word may be didactically spoken, to teach them. Let the girl take her summer not only as an opportunity to grow closer to her family but also as a chance to learn home-making, to train herself in the practical things of the home. This practical training is often a very valuable supplement to the school work. The time is passed when the learned woman who is unable to do anything for herself is the ideal—if she ever has been that. The inability to make a home for herself, to do all the necessary things daintily, detracts from a woman's power. In practical ways a woman should be both dainty and capable. Parents, as well as girls, sometimes forget or do not clearly recognize the fact that no school, no college, can take the place of the home, that schools are not primarily schools in home-making, but rather schools of general education. The summer is a good time for the girl to find her place again in the home life, and for both parents and children to rejoice in the pleasures of the home—pleasures and opportunities which no institutional life can give.
XI
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.