Such a conception of a classroom is not fair-play.  The teacher, like the coxswain 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 classroom 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 attitude on the part of merely one student in the class, every other student associated 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 classroom, 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 class 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 classroom in general and to the instructor.  The least she can do in this class 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 classroom 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 class 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.