Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/135

 I should not, perhaps, blame the boy's lack of good manners and good taste upon his fraternity any more than I should hold it responsible for his failure to pass his high school course in English, but the fraternity, when it took him in, knew what he was, that he had neither moral nor intellectual ideals, that he had no conception of good manners, though his father, it is true, is a prominent professional man. It was this last fact that weighed most heavily in the balance when the boy was being considered for membership. My quarrel with the fraternity lies in the fact that having taken him in it has done nothing to improve him, but on the contrary has rather encouraged him in his extreme habits. It is not giving him the sort of social training that a boy should get in high school.

We can never quite get away from the fact in the discussion of a high school boy's social activities that most high schools are coeducational. In considering boys, we can not ignore the fact that girls, too, come in for a large share of consideration. It is a good thing for a young boy to have a healthy conventional association with girls. It helps him morally and socially. I think that a boy can have no stronger moral influence than the companionship of a high-principled, well-balanced girl. The boy, however, who limits his as associations to girls, or especially to one girl, or who gives a considerable part of his leisure time to such an association is weakened by it. He becomes soft and mushy; he moons around