A Girls Student Days and After | Page 4

and stronger. Let us think about these
girls, let us think about what it means to be a freshman, and so lessen
our difficulties and increase our pleasures; let us have a big
conception,--a large ideal always at heart--of what the first year should
be, and beginning well we shall be the more likely to end well.

II
THE GIRL AND THE SCHOOL
Inside school or college the girl is in several ways responsible for the
atmosphere. Merely in her conversation she can be of service or

dis-service. It may be simply a good joke which she is telling, but if the
joke misrepresents the school she will, perhaps, do lasting harm. If she
is hypercritical--and there is nothing so contagious as criticism--she
influences people in the direction of her thought; she sets a current of
criticism in motion. A student frequently gives vent to an opinion that
is only half-baked--it is well, by the way, to make zwieback of all our
opinions before we pass them around as edible--about courses and
instructors. She does not realize that some opinions to be worth
anything must be the result of a long process of baking, that a nibble
from the corner of a four months' or nine months' course will not,
however understandingly it may be Fletcherized, tell you whether the
course is going to be fruit cake, meringue or common soda crackers.
She may think that she herself is so unimportant that what she says
can't matter, or she may not mean what she says and be merely letting
off steam. Nevertheless her influence is exerted. Some one showed an
old lady, who had never been known to say anything in the least critical
of any human being, the picture of a very fat man prominent in public
life. She looked at it a moment, and then said sweetly: "My, isn't he
plump!" If only there were more old and young ladies like that dear
soul!
There is another kind of conversation which may not be ill-natured and
yet does harm. Idle gossiping, talking about things that are not worth
while or speculating about affairs which are not our business and of
which we know little or nothing. Akin to this is fashionably slangy
conversation concerning the latest thing in books, magazine articles,
trivial plays. For even the "tone" of school or college conversation a
student is responsible. She can make her school seem cheap or
cultivated. The remarks which visitors overhear as they go from room
to room or from building to building are likely to indicate the "tone" of
an institution. A catalogue may say all it pleases about a school but in
the end the school is judged by the women it educates and sends out,
even as a tree is known by its fruit. Cultivated, strong women are worth
more in advertisement than all the printed material in the world,
however laudatory.
When a girl has received everything her Alma Mater has to give, she

has no right to be untrue to its fundamental aims and ideals, or to
misrepresent it in any way, either by what she says or by her own
behaviour. Every student in a large institution is in a sense a pensioner.
No student can pay for what is given to her. Is it not a poor return for
her to be reflecting dishonour rather than honour upon her school?
There is a certain social selfishness in the way some students take their
opportunities for granted without realizing that there are thousands and
hundreds of thousands of girls who would give all that they possess for
a tithe of such riches. Also, because of the sacrifice which is being
made for them at home girls are selfish in taking their school or college
life carelessly. The school has to bear much of the responsibility for the
individual failure. But of this the student who is failing rarely thinks.
Parents hold an institution to blame if it does not do for their child what
they expect it to do, when it may be the girl who is at fault.
In the use she makes of her portion of inheritance, in the gift the school
bestows on the student, there is a large social question involved. The
school gives her of its wealth, the result of the accumulation of years
and of the civic or philanthropic spirit of many men and women. This,
if the girl's sense of responsibility is what it should be, she feels bound
to increase and hand on. It is the old noblesse oblige under new
conditions of privilege.
While she is still in school the girl discharges part of this obligation by
realizing what is best for her school as an institution. A college or a big
school is no