Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/40

 meet unexpected trials by having overcome this mental hardship.

"What are you going to take next half year?" I asked Donald at mid-year.

"I don't know," he replied. "Do you know any snap course?"

The snap, whatever it is, will get a boy nowhere excepting to give him credits, and what one ought to want out of four years of high school is training that will make one happier and more able to think and that will fit one better to do the hard but necessary things of life.

Next to the interesting and the easy, the practical is what now appeals to the majority of boys. There is no sort of bunkum in educational matters that appeals now so strongly to the public as that which is presented with the label "practical" on it. It is like the old "made in Germany" which used so to appeal to us when we found it on an article in which we were interested, and it is about as cheap and worthless in its significance. Our high school courses are crammed full of subjects which are supposed to be eminently practical and which will assist those who have taken them almost immediately to make money or to get a job or to do something. Typewriting, stenography, cooking, dressmaking, millinery, plumbing, typesetting, manual training, pharmacy, business English and business arithmetic, whatever these last two subjects may be, may all be found in one or another