Children of all grades do their best work when they have interest and
enthusiasm for the work and the school. School spirit can be carried to
extremes, but in moderation it should be encouraged. The clique evil
needs careful, tactful treatment, for the suppression of school
societies sometimes leads to the formation of secret organizations
imbued with all the mystery and solemnity of the adults’ lodge, which
are much harder to eradicate than the open, above-board kind, and seem
to be many times more attractive to the adolescent mind.
Adolescence is the sensitive age, the age when small slights cut deepest
and pride is most easily wounded, as well as the period when secrets and
mystery are most alluring. It is positively cruel for the young people
of a school to make their classmates suffer as they have the power to
do, by organizing good times and meetings from which the majority of the
school are excluded.
The clique evil is much more likely to develop into serious proportions
in a small school of a few hundred than in a large one of a thousand or
more.
Children, as well as adults, choose for friends persons of the same or
similar tastes, but in a small school the grouping of these kindred
spirits into an exclusive organization is particularly bad, because
there are usually not enough other pupils with the spirit and initiative
to form rival organizations; there is usually one clique only, which
excludes the majority of the school from its ranks, instead of several
which offset each other.