[Sidenote: Sororities]
A high school of about 150 pupils in a prosperous little western town
became afflicted with the clique disease. Margaret Hancock, the daughter
of one of the town’s most prominent citizens and rather a spoiled child
at home, returned from a winter spent in a southern city, where she had
gone to a large high school and had been admitted to one of the numerous
sororities there. She came back thoroughly imbued with the ideals of the
southern high school, which was in the wealthy, aristocratic part of the
city and attended by girls who expected to become debutantes in a few
years and make “society” their career. This southern high school was a
large one and the clique spirit was not so harmful because there were
several such groups to offset each other and the pupils were, on the
whole, of the same social class.
Back in her home town again, Margaret succeeded in organizing a sorority
before the first month of the school year had passed. She included in
her secret society the girls whom she thought the “nicest” in the
school. These girls were the ones who most nearly approached the
prospective belles of the southern high school in type—the girls with
the most money and the prettiest clothes, the ones whose parents were
frequent visitors in Margaret’s home. This clique or sorority included
about twenty pupils in its membership and, needless to say, in a school
of that size was quite out of place.
It was not long before the boys followed the example set by the girls
and formed a secret club of limited membership, and then how the two
organizations did lord it over the rest of the school!
Boys who had come in from the country and worked for their board in
order to get a high school education were looked down upon and made to
feel ashamed of their rural origin and their manner of life. Girls whose
clothes were not so fine or so numerous as those of Margaret’s friends
were hurt to the quick by the sneers of their classmates and by being
left out when invitations to little dances and home parties were being
given out.
The two clubs soon managed things so that all the class officers were
from among their members and all school functions were under their
management. The school became not a democracy, but an aristocracy of the
narrowest variety.
There were so many club functions and good times that school work
suffered and these affairs had to be talked over so extensively, by
those who had and had not been present alike, that there was more
trouble than ever before about whispering and note-writing.
Several of the pupils who had been neglected and left entirely out of
the social whirl lost interest in school altogether and dropped out.
It was thus that the clique spirit upset the morale of the whole school
and lowered the quality of the work many degrees.