A Girl's Student Days and After eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 75 pages of information about A Girl's Student Days and After.

A Girl's Student Days and After eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 75 pages of information about A Girl's Student Days and After.

This is the girl who goes into school in much the same spirit that she would enter upon a larger life.  She is not a prig and she is not a dig, but she knows there are responsibilities to be met and she meets them.  She expects to have to think about the new conditions in which she finds herself and to adjust herself to them, and she does it.  She knows the meaning of the team-play spirit and she takes her place quietly on the team, one among many, and both works and plays with respect for the rights and positions of others.  It is in the temper of the words sometimes stamped upon the coins of our country—­E Pluribus Unum—­that she makes a success of her school life.  She knows that not only is our country bigger than any one of its states, but also that every school is bigger than any one of its members whether teacher or student.  In a small family at home conditions have been more or less made for her, just as they are for other girls.  Yet she knows that the school life is complicated and complex, and it is impossible for her to feel neglected where a more self-centred or spoiled girl fails to see that in this new life she is called upon to play a minor part but nevertheless a part upon which the school must rely for its esprit de corps.  She goes with ease from the somewhat unmethodical life of the home to the highly organized routine of the school because she understands the meaning of the word “team-play.”  She has the cooeperative spirit.

Yet there are other girls, too, in this school which the freshman is entering.  There is the student who errs on the side of leading too workaday a life, and in so doing has lost something of the buoyancy and breadth and “snap” which would make her associations and her work fresher and more vigorous.  “The Grind,” she has been called, and if she recognize herself in this sketch, let her take care to reach out for a bigger and fuller life than she is leading.  And there is, too, the selfish student whose “class-spirit” is self-spirit; and the girl who is not selfish but who uses herself up in too many interests, dramatic, athletic, society, philanthropic and in a dozen others.  She is probably over-conscientious, a good girl in every way, but in doing too much she loses sight of the real aim of her school life.  To these must be added another student,—­the freshman who skims the surface, and is, when she gets out, where she was when she entered—­no, not quite so far along, for she has slipped back.  She is selfish, relying upon the patience and burden-bearing capacity of her father and mother, as well as the school.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
A Girl's Student Days and After from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.