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.
Another point for which the school looks in recommending its students is
physical fitness, which shows itself in many different ways: in voice,
in carriage, in attractiveness, in staying power. One teacher who had
an excellent record as a student and was, besides, a fine girl, had so
unpleasant and absurd a voice that her students were in a continual
state of amusement and would learn nothing from her. A great many
teachers have lost in power because of a poor voice, strident, or
lifeless, or husky, or falsetto. A poor enunciation, or words that do
not carry, are ineffectual means by which to reach a class, to hold a
customer, or to introduce one's self favourably to the interest of
others. For a girl who is going to have any part in public life--and
most girls do nowadays--a good voice is an absolute essential. And it is
well for us to remember that the voice is not something superficial, but
that it is the expression of that which is within.
Another way in which physical fitness shows itself is in the carriage. A
girl who carries herself with erectness and energy brings a certain
conviction with her of fitness for many things, of self-respect, of
ability, and reveals in her bearing something of her mind as well as of
her body. We are always tempted to think a person who "slumps"
physically may slump in other ways. A good carriage, good voice, and
strong, clean, digestive system are far more important than beauty of
features.
There is another matter at which the school in placing its students must
look. To be a desirable candidate for a good position a girl need not be
expensively gowned, but she must be daintily and freshly dressed.
Immaculate shirt waist, a plain, well-made skirt, with good shoes,
stockings and gloves and a quiet, pretty hat, are all any woman needs in
meeting her business obligations. And that daintiness which she shows in
her dress she must show in her person too, in clean skin and
finger-nails, good teeth, and smooth, attractively arranged hair.
It is very important for the interests of a school, as well as for the
individual, to place its students advantageously. To have them succeed
widens its sphere of usefulness and influence and opens new channels of
service. Every college puts itself to considerable expense in looking
out for the interests of its students, for the glory of a great school
lies not only in the people whom it collects into its midst, but even
more in those whom it sends out. A girl has no right to go so lightly
through her school life that she fails to see in it all the
self-sacrifice and effort and ambitions that have gone into the building
up of what is her privilege and opportunity. In so far as she does this
she fails in the team-play spirit. Why should a girl think that she can
spend her father's money, or the means of her school, thoughtlessly?
What would happen to her if she did this with the funds of her
basket-ball team? Yet girls waste the resources of their school by
carelessness with its property, a carelessness that collectively mounts
up into thousands of dollars, and never once stop to think how
difficult every big school finds it to make ends meet.
Before it is too late, at least now that she is leaving school, let her
stop to realize that a great deal of the work for an institution is
along the line of self-sacrifice, in the gifts given, in the work of its
administrators and teachers. This unselfishness means a financial loss,
for business ability might be invested in more lucrative ways; it means
a social sacrifice, for there is a certain kind of impersonality which
is demanded in work that deals with a continually changing community; it
means risk in the great strain put upon physical and nervous strength;
it means forgetting one's self; for the true teacher is willing to be
forgotten when she has served others. What a school may accomplish for
its students is its only compensation for all this self-sacrifice.