A Girl's Student Days and After Part 2

But the highest power of which human beings are possessed is not the power of the body. It is the power of the mind. Yet many of us throughout our school and college life not only do not wish to use this power but even rebel against it. "What," some girls are saying to themselves, "enjoy the work of a cla.s.sroom? Who ever heard of such a thing!" Yes, just that. And if we don't enjoy the work of a cla.s.sroom, even an indifferently good one, there is something the matter with us, or the subject should not have a place on any curriculum. Every mental exercise should be full of the keenest pleasure, of intellectual pleasure.

Our schools and colleges to-day are very much richer in the joy of everything else--in beautiful surroundings, in freer and fuller athletic and outdoor life, in a more varied and delightful social life--than they were fifty or even twenty-five years ago. But it is a question whether the joy of intellectual work has kept pace with this joy of life in its other aspects. Sometimes it almost seems as if intellectual eagerness were in inverse ratio to the ease and fullness of the opportunities we have. At least many fair-minded girls have seen the predicament in which the teacher is placed. The man who makes a vase for the use and pleasure of others may rejoice not only in his own workmans.h.i.+p but also in the thought of the service and delight he is giving to others. That is, his pleasure is twofold. The teacher who is deprived of some response of joy in the work he is doing is a workman deprived of his rights. To those girls who are thinking of becoming teachers this should be a sobering thought.

Missionary teachers, with their students eager to get anything they have to give, are not to be pitied. Our schools and their groups of teachers in isolated and uncultivated parts of the West and South are not to be pitied. Even if education is with them shorn of much that gives it charm, the opportunities that come are prized. Students and teachers have intellectual joy in the work they do, and without that the greatest university in the world might as well, or better, be a district school, for then the work done would be truly useful. It is the teacher who has to put much of her time and energy into making a subject superficially attractive enough for a student to elect it, who is to be pitied. A cla.s.sroom full of blase girls whose minds need to be tickled before there is the least expression of intellectual mirth upon their faces, is an ordeal not lightly to be met except by the professional joker or academic tumbler.

Girls often become impatient with themselves, and that is one reason why there is so little joy in work for them. Think of Helen Keller as a famous example of this joy in work under the most adverse circ.u.mstances.

What could be greater than her handicap? Shut away from the world by deaf ears and blind eyes and, for a while, by inability to speak, she has nevertheless shown a keenness of pleasure and intellectual acquisition that shames us who have all our senses in their fullness.

Think of her patient, unremitting delving, of the digging up, up, up to get to the light which most human beings are privileged to enjoy with no effort at all! The mind that accepts this wealth with no thought, no sense of responsibility, is a trifler with riches that are about us for G.o.d-given purposes. Think of the way in which Stevenson and John Richard Green and George Eliot rose above their ill-health and did their work in despite of it! Perhaps some of us have superb health and have never made any conscious effort to use that gift for a high end.

Girls grow impatient with themselves when they wouldn't be impatient with a little child. Yet the mind has to be trained even as we train a child; it has to be brought back and back, again and again to the thing to be done. After the asking of a simple question, oftentimes a whole cla.s.s will look confounded, because they have some strange notion that thinking means getting hold of something very far away and difficult to grasp. All that the first effort in thought denotes is taking a hold of that which is nearest and following it up. It is the old story of Theseus following his clue of thread, the slender thing in his hand, by which he was guided out of the labyrinth and to the broad sea of adventure.

There are difficulties in the doing of any work that is worth while. It would be a poor adviser who painted the student's way as a path of roses. First and foremost, one's own inertia interferes with the joy of work. Some one has defined the lazy man as one who doesn't want to do anything at all, and the indolent man as one who doesn't want to do anything that he doesn't want to do. Then, too, there are certain allurements and distractions in school life which are a hindrance to our joy in an intellectual task. And there is the very natural disinclination to the drudgery involved in all hard labour. No work that is worth while is without drudgery. Lack of encouragement from older people is one serious difficulty some girls have to meet. There is a type of older person who is sure that using the mind will harm that precious article. And, finally, there is our inexperience, our own lack of comprehension, our own purposeless and formless lives.

Joy in work should not be altogether conditional upon one's sense of ease or upon what is called success. Seeming success is not always success. Often the most valuable lessons come from failures. Robert Browning, the poet, speaks again and again of the n.o.ble uses of failure.

Let me quote one stanza from one of his greatest poems, "Rabbi Ben Ezra":

"Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!

Be our joys three-parts pain!

Strive and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"

You can't learn to walk if you haven't tumbled down a good deal in doing it. It is often failure that means ultimate success. Of course if a girl keeps on saying: "Oh, what's the use?" about everything she does and all her failures, there isn't any use. In weak moments that sort of thing can be said of every great and worth-while experience, of love, of joy, of sorrow, of work. But a girl who allows herself to take this att.i.tude is a "quitter," and doesn't know the first principles of playing the game.

Part of the joy of work consists in the mere delight of intellectual exercise, delight in thinking a thing out. That is the way we develop ourselves mentally, just as we develop ourselves physically through sports. The mind that thinks is capable of deeper and broader thinking.

Thinking begets thought. A muscle that is left without exercise softens and finally atrophies. The same is true of mental muscle. If this strength is left unused it is gradually lost and cannot be recovered.

Mental concentration, the thought that is so strenuous that everything else is shut out, strengthens the mind. In this wonderful old world no new land has been discovered without physical effort. There is no country of the mind which can be entered without a similar effort.

And there is another and very important joy in work--the sense that one is being equipped for the work of the world, for usefulness. The mere feeling that one's powers are being developed brings joy with it. There is still another joy which every one of us must covet--the sense of entering into the intellectual riches of the world, its wonders of science and art and letters, with the feeling that we have a part in a great treasure, a treasure which, unlike gold and precious stones, men have never been able to gauge or to exhaust. Such gold and silver as we take from that adventure cannot be lost or stolen from us. It remains with us to the very last, and with it no life can ever become really poor, or dull, or old.

VII

FAIR-PLAY

Few students realize how closely a cla.s.sroom resembles a commonwealth.

To most of us it seems a place into which we go to have a certain amount got out of us, or put into us. This conception of the cla.s.sroom is unworthy the modern girl who has, otherwise, a fine understanding of the meaning of team-play, of playing all together for a common end, a game or a republic united by a tacit compact.

Does the average student feel responsibility for the game of basket-ball or lawn hockey which she is playing? The first thought of the girl in answering this is that it was a foolish question even to ask. Of course she does. But for her cla.s.sroom? No, that is a different sort of game, in which the responsibility lies all on the shoulders of the instructor.

It is a one-woman or a one-man game, and very often the students are but spectators, cheering or indifferent, approving or disapproving. The pupil does not hold herself accountable for this game; it is the teacher who makes the cla.s.s "go," who extracts from each student the information bottled up in her, together, often, with a good deal of carbon dioxide,--a process difficult and hard as drawing a swollen cork out of a soda-water bottle. Finally, with a sort of n.o.ble rebound of effort, the exhausted instructor is to put a vast deal of information back into the girl before the student claps her book together and rushes pell-mell to the next cla.s.sroom, there to be similarly uncorked, if the teacher has learned the art and her mental muscle is sufficient.

Such a conception of a cla.s.sroom is not fair-play. The teacher, like the c.o.xswain of a college crew, may have rowed over the same course and she may know it well enough to cover it in the dark; she may have won distinction upon it, may be the fittest person in all the states of the Union to cover it again, but if she has not a good or a winning crew to coach, she will never win any race, even the shortest. No instructor has shoulders equal to such a multiple burden as coaching, steering and doing all the rowing, too. To play any cla.s.sroom game in this spirit is to be dead weight for every one else embarked upon the same adventure.

It is not fair-play.

By such an att.i.tude on the part of merely one student in the cla.s.s, every other student a.s.sociated with her loses, for the girl who will not lift her own weight the others must carry. If that student were playing in that spirit on the basket-ball team, do you suppose that the coach, or the captain, would let her stay on? Not for a moment; off she would go and very much humiliated, too. If it is a discussion, the touch and go of the whole recitation will depend upon the presence of the team-play, or fair-play, spirit in the course. The instructor may do her best but if there is no play-the-game in that cla.s.sroom, she might just as well fold up her tent, like the proverbial Arab, "and silently steal away." It is not that any recitation need be a brilliant affair--if most of them depended upon that for existence they would scarcely exist at all--but there must be an honest, earnest, responsible effort to make the best of the hour. Good will inevitably come from the clarifying effort to express thought, and the leading from thought to thought as the work goes forward.

The basket-ball team cannot win, or even play, unless all the members are playing together. Each one is needed despite the fact that she may not be one of the chief or best players. Just so does the cla.s.s need all its students. If a girl is only average, it is not fair-play for her to sit back and do nothing; neither is it fair-play for her to monopolize the attention if she happens to be more than commonly able. It is not fair-play to laugh at the girl who is at a disadvantage, or to appear bored. It is unfair to the individual, to the cla.s.sroom in general and to the instructor. The least she can do in this cla.s.s game is to give her whole and her courteous attention.

Think of all the practice games in which the average athletic team takes part. What can be said for the student who comes into the cla.s.sroom unprepared to lift her own weight, unprepared to help others? When one comes to think about it from the fair-play point of view there is nothing to be said for her. Nor is it fair-play for a girl to allow herself to get into such a state physically that she is unable to study.

How often and often have fudge-heads--due to an application to too much sugar and not to books--sitting row after row killed a school or even a whole college! Before a cla.s.s tempered by fudge and not by wholesome outdoor living and conscientious devotion to work, the teacher might better put away her notes and close her book. Nothing can happen through or over that barricade of fudge-heads.

And it is not fair-play to cram because of time lost, or for any other cause. The only end of cramming is that the student soon forgets all that has been learned. Alone by normal, slow acquisition and all the a.s.sociations formed in such learning can information come to us to stay.

It may not be particularly wicked to cram if one has plenty of time to waste, but it is foolish unless one has.

There is a kind of gossip in which a girl takes part, made up of snap-shot judgments of the cla.s.sroom, idle carping about some little unimportant point, expression of wounded vanity and unfair talk, which may mean a tremendous loss of prestige for a really admirable course; it may mean that girls, who would naturally go into it because of their liking or gift for the work, do not go or go in a critical and unsympathetic att.i.tude. If there is a complaint to be made about any course it should be made to the responsible person concerned, and that is usually the teacher. Anything else is not fair-play. In the cla.s.sroom the instructor is the "coach" of the game and she is the person with whom to talk. It is needless to say that if a girl is putting nothing into a course she cannot expect to get anything out of it, or to complain because things do not "go." If she wants them to "go"

why does she not help, and have the profit of taking something away from the work as interest on her effort? A girl gets dividends only from work into which she has put some brain-capital.

And the people at home? Is it fair-play to them, when they are making sacrifices of money or of happiness to keep the daughter at school, for her not to put good work into her study and play her part faithfully in the cla.s.sroom game? So many things have to be taken into consideration of which we are not likely to think. There is the girl herself, the other girls with whom she is working, the instructor, the people at home, the inst.i.tution that is providing an expensive equipment or plant through the philanthropic efforts of others or the taxation of the public. If the girl does not play her part fairly, there is a rather big reckoning against her, is there not?

VIII

THE RIGHT SORT OF LEISURE

The right sort of leisure ought to help as much in the development of the girl as the right sort of work. If it is leisure worthy the name, it will bring refreshment; it will not leave one physically and mentally jaded. Neither mind nor body should ever be exhausted because of the way in which freedom has been used. Leisure is as important to work as work is to leisure. A person who has not worked cannot appreciate freedom, while the one who has had no leisure is not best fitted for work. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy;" it is just as true that it makes Jill a dull girl. The girl who works all the time, not realizing the importance of free moments, becomes f.a.gged in body and mind. She is a tool that is dull, and would do well to remember that even a machine is better for an occasional rest.

Some mistaken ideas about leisure have grown up, making it difficult to say anything on this subject without being misunderstood. Stories--whole books of them--about "spreads" and more or less lawless escapades in school and college, have given girls and other people, too, the impression that this is the sort of thing school leisure is. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Midnight feasts may occur in school, and most of us, unless we are too good to be average girls, have taken part in them. But such stories are vicious, for they misrepresent the life by suggesting that eating inferior and unwholesome food is the real freedom most girls desire. There is something repulsive in the very thought. Feasts that leave a girl with a coated tongue and a dull head and Monday "blues" do not fairly represent school or college leisure.

Good times that interfere with good work have no place in ideally free hours. But, indeed, the odours from the chafing-dishes do suggest that some of the girls are trying to put into literal execution the wish of a great German professor in Oxford. The professor, eager to try a dish he saw on the hotel bill of fare, but with his English and German verbs not quite disentangled, said to the waiter, "Hereafter I vish to become a Velsh Rabbit." Perhaps becoming a Welsh rarebit represents the height of some girls' ideals, but this is hard to believe.

The possession of leisure depends to a great extent upon the will power.

The girl who has never learned to say "No," who has no power of selection, cannot expect to have any hours for her own use. She is quarry for every idle suggestion, every social engagement, every executive "job" which pursues her. The girl who engages all her time socially cannot have a sense of leisure, for she turns her playtime into but another schedule, to be met as inexorably as her academic courses.

Her days become a formidable array of "dates," often stretching ahead for weeks. Even if girls are not determined to have it for themselves, they should give to others some opportunity for freedom, and should respect their possible desire for solitude. The girl who engages or annexes every particle of time, her own or that of some one else with whom she comes in contact, is making leisure an impossibility. The girl who leaves no margin cannot hope for even the spirit of freedom.

Many students excuse themselves for much executive work in school and college on the ground that it is done in their leisure. That girl is a goose who allows herself through any sense of self-importance, or irreplaceable usefulness, to be so involved in executive work that all other aspects of her school life are slighted. If she refuses to be swamped by such "jobs" she can have the happiness of reflecting that probably some girls who need the training far more than she does are doing the work. To every girl will come the opportunity right along for "managing"; club and social work will bring it, and a good-sized family will bring it as nothing else can. But school leisure she will not have again. The whole aim of the school is to enrich the lives of its students, and it knows all too well that that student who does not keep for herself the leisure upon which body and mind and soul must feed is indeed poor.

There is one way in which leisure is very generally misspent in school--and alas, outside, too!--not in managing one's own affairs, but in managing and discussing the affairs of others. At such times the remarks may be superlatively pleasant, but they are more often superlatively disagreeable. It may be said with truthfulness that they are almost never moderate or just. Everything is all black or all white, with no gray. It makes one think of the little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead:

"When she was good, she was very, very good, And when she was bad, she was horrid."

But, alas! the poor wretches discussed are not allowed even the natural and somewhat happy human alternation between badness and goodness. No, indeed, they are monsters of a desperate character--they may at the moment be broken-heartedly conscious of their own faults--or they are s.h.i.+ning six-winged angels. And, woe! this sort of thing comes almost as hard upon the angels. They can't endure it; so much goodness breaks down their wing arches, and the glorious ones crumple together like tissue-paper.

And upon the girls busily engaged in creating angels of loveliness and gargoyles of ugliness, this sort of conversation works havoc. It does not invigorate them, it does not inspire them. It belittles their minds--thank fortune, that making kindling wood of the characters of other people does do this!--and stunts their finer feelings. This sin, that they "do by two and two," they pay for one by one. Gentle and considerate feelings are lost, time is wasted, a vicious habit,--almost no habit is more vicious,--is acquired. Such gossip can never become a pure enjoyment; it remains at the best an ign.o.ble, discreditable excitement. Rolling these sweet morsels under their tongues, a taste for ill-natured or exaggerated comment fixes itself in their mouths. Even if they have consciences that, like good mothers, will occasionally wash their mouths out with soap, they retain the disturbing memory of unkind, coa.r.s.e, or foolish words.

Yet school should be the last place in which to indulge in idle talk.

Such indulgence is against all the idealism of student life. Idle or meddlesome talk never helps any one, either the one who talks or the one who is discussed. If you have anything to say about other people, and if going to them will help you, the only friendly thing to do--it is not an easy thing--is to speak to the people concerned. If we really knew how to put ourselves in other people's places, no unkind, unfriendly words would ever be spoken again. There would be things hard to bear said--rebuke or reproof are never easy to receive--but nothing unfriendly. Think how idle, ill-natured talk flows around the world, and then think what a different world it would be if there were none of it!

It is to human life what the blights, the scales, the insect pests are to tree and flower. Fortunately, as people grow older they come to think themselves less infallible, and as they grow wiser they become more tender and more lenient in their judgments.

In companions.h.i.+p whose leisure interests are good there is a sense of freedom filled full and running over, of minds and hearts doubly rich, of good times doubly jolly. But on the whole, girls have too little absolute solitude; there is scarcely a girl in twenty, except the "dig,"

who is alone at all. One trouble with dormitory school life is that it fosters leisure-wasting and time-wasting "gang" habits. A girl so surrounded never wants to be alone a moment, either indoors or out. With such, the blessing and blessedness of solitude should be learned, for solitude rightly used makes strong men and women.

The woman who has leisure has a grasp upon time, is master of it instead of being mastered by it. It is the girl whirled around in a squirrel cage of pointless weekly and Sunday engagements who is oppressed and mastered by her lack of freedom. And then there is the hard-pressed future; we must lay up some leisure for that. The time when one is most hurried is the time when one most needs the sense of freedom. The story of the old Quaker lady who had so much to do she didn't know where to begin, and so took a nap, is profoundly full of wisdom. When the old lady woke up she found she had plenty of time after all, not because she had done anything but because she had come again into a leisurely frame of mind.

Leisure means neither a blank mind nor an empty hand. It means a holiday taken with an eager mind, with eyes keen in their delight and knowledge, with hands capable of some beauty or some use. All of us have leisure to think, but not all of us think. Some of us, if friends come in unexpectedly, will quickly pick up something and pretend to be busy.

When Watt sat by the fire watching the steam from the teakettle lift the lid, he was not precisely idle. The powerful, indispensable steam-engine was the result. One reason, aside from all religious considerations, why we need a quiet Sunday, is that we may have that sense of freedom which feeds mind and body, and even the crumbs of whose profitableness have made the world rich in great inventions, in great pictures, in wonderful books.