Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/187

 talkative being; he loves ease, leisure, sleep, coca cola, cigarettes, chocolate bostons, and girls. He is a stroller, a hanger on. If, as I am writing these paragraphs, I should look out of my window upon the broad green expanse of our back campus, I should catch sight of him walking lazily under the shade of the tall elm trees of Burrill Avenue, or sprawled upon the grass, a girl by his side, a smile on his face, his books and his intellectual obligations forgotten. He knows the last dance step, the latest gossip, and he has seen the last bills at the Orpheum. He would be entirely innocuous if he were not allowed to run at large. The trouble is he infects the crowd.

It is not difficult to understand the environment which conduces to the development of this type of student. At home he has neither been given nor has he assumed any responsibility. He has had no duties, no regular set tasks; he has done no work; often he has been mother's darling. It has usually, at home, been a problem as to what should be done with him in the summer vacation when there was no school, so he loafed around lazy and discontented. He has seldom done well in his preparatory school or high school; he has passed, but neither he nor his parents have had any ambitions for him to be a grind or the valedictorian of his class. If his mother were asked she would probably say, "We are very well satisfied with what Clarence has done in high school; he is not a natural student, and has never been very strong, so that we have never pushed him nor wanted him to ." And Clarence has done as his parents desired and has never overstudied.

He comes naturally to speak of himself as "no