Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/131

 ally is free from the objectionable features which characterize such an organization in a city high school. It is largely to make boys acquainted with each other, and not so much to bring the members into closer and more frequent association with girls. It makes for healthy friendship.

The high school fraternity is too frequently little more than a dancing club. Its meetings are taken up largely with discussions of the girl friends of the members, in making arrangements for the next dance, or in trying to determine how best to meet the expenses of the last one. If it gave boys definite work to do, if it developed in them qualities of leadership, or helped them the better to assume responsibility while giving them social training, I should not so much object, but as I have seen the members of such an organization after they are out of high school and in college, I can not see that it often does any of these things for them.

My observation of the high school fraternity man after he has entered college is that he is usually a very indifferent student with little scholastic ambition. His ambitions are mainly social. He makes a poor fraternity man in college, beause he has not realized in his high school fraternity any of the fundamental principles of adult fraternity life. Fraternity officers all over the country are agreed upon this point, and have passed a resolution that after 1920 no high school fraternity man will be eligible for membership in a college Greek letter fra-