Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/27

 to be excused from them, if that is the custom of the school, on account of his cleverness, and still have disciplined his mind very little. Unless he studies regularly, unless he pushes himself often to do his intellectual best, he will train his mind as inadequately as the athlete trains his body when he practices irregularly and never does his best.

"I don't see why George failed in college," I heard a mother say not long ago. "He never studied in high school, and yet he managed to get fine grades."

She did not realize that she had herself given the explanation. The high school boy who is so clever that he never has to "crack" a book, as they say, who has never submitted even for a brief time to mental drudgery, who doesn't pretty frequently settle down and dig his level best, is going to have trouble later with his brain, for sometime when he will want it to work, it will rebel like a balky ill-trained horse. It will run away from him as he ran away from his duties at home. The high school boy in many cases knows little about concentration and less about hard, consistent study. That is why he fails sometimes when he goes to college, and quite as often as not it is the clever boy in high school who fails when he gets to college.

Regular study hours, the doing of difficult things well, the holding of oneself to accuracy and rapidity of thinking, concentration of attention upon a definite problem or piece of work for a reasonable time—these are some of the