Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/152

148 boy takes his proper place when honest, democratic brain effort is required of him. If he is not a student, he will no longer pretend to be one and ought not to be in college. The rowdy, the mucker, the hair-cutting, gate-lifting, cane-rushing imbecile is never a real student. He is a gamin masquerading in cap and gown. The requirement of scholarship brings him to terms. If we insist that our colleges shall not pretend to educate those who can not or will not be educated, we shall have no trouble with the moral training of the students.

Above all, in the West, where education is free, we should insist that free tuition means serious work, that education means opportunity, that the student should do his part, and that the degree of the university should not be the seal of academic approbation of four years of idleness, rowdyism, profligacy or dissipation.

Higher education, properly speaking, begins when a young man goes away from home to school. The best part of higher education is the development of the instincts of the gentleman and the horizon of the scholar. To this end, self-directed industry is one of the most effective agents. As the force of example is potent in education, a college should tolerate idleness and vice neither among its students nor among its teachers.