[Sidenote: Responsibility]
Stiffen up your demands requiring fidelity in pupils. Give strict,
perhaps stern injunctions about guarding the treasures given into their
charge.
Say to Julius and Henry: “Charles has suffered a real loss and I know
you fellows are as sorry about it as I am. It’s just this way: suppose
you or I left a suit-case at the station and got a check for it,
wouldn’t we expect to get our suit-case back again? I really think I am
a good deal to blame for this myself. When you both said, ‘All right,’ I
might have made it a little plainer that I wanted you to keep a sharp
eye on this property.
“I tell you what you do; you get the bird-house for me. See if you can
get it to me by five o’clock this afternoon.”
When selecting custodians of property be sure that at least one of each
group is a pupil in which you have the utmost confidence. Nevertheless
assign duty of this sort to pupils who are not so dependable, linking
them up with trustworthy schoolmates; duty of this type should not be
confined to a favored few.
If a breach of confidence occurs, follow up the matter unrelentingly.
The words employed to secure the desired information may be well
tempered; but the certainty of rigid inquiry should not be suspended for
a moment.
Teacher and administrator are to maintain an atmosphere of unreserved
insistence that the common virtues be rigorously maintained by the
pupils and that fidelity when these virtues are involved in discharging
a duty must be preserved at all hazards.
The attitude of expectancy is one of the greatest safeguards against
criminal negligence.