Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/57

 are as a pole vaulter or how enchantingly you warble on the Glee Club, if you do not carry your work creditably at the end of the semester, you are a failure so far as high school is concerned. It isn't enough that you make the debating team or are elected class president or are known as the most popular boy in school; it's the studies that count.

Too many boys go to high school without much definite purpose. They expect to go to college, and high school is part of the necessary routine for the accomplishment of that result. All the other fellows are going, and it is easier to go than not to do so. They would rather continue going to school, as one boy told me, than go to work; and soit goes. If they were asked what their reasons are—if any boy who is reading this essay were to ask himself—the answer would in all probability be that they "wanted an education," whatever that may mean. I am not sure that with all the experience I have had and with all the definitions I have read, I could myself give an adequate explanation of what education really means, but I am sure that it means in some degree training of the mind, and that such training comes through application and regular rigid exercise of the brain, through the accomplishing of mental tasks that are not easy and not always pleasant. Every young boy knows that if he expects to amount to anything as an athlete he must train regularly and persistently, that he must deny himself many things which he would otherwise enjoy, and that he must not only constantly do his best, but that he must be striving all the