If the school training is worth anything at all, it makes the most of unpromising material.  Its really discouraging experience is not with the girl of limited ability who gives her best and so in some sense gets the best, but with the student who doesn’t give her best and who, because of her own indifference, is always misrepresenting the training she is receiving.  No school ever wishes to have its ideals confused by a vulgar display of wealth or by loud or conspicuous behaviour.  Yet many a school, with ideals all that they should be, is misjudged in public places because of some thoughtless or unreliable girls.  This doesn’t seem like fair-play or team-play, does it?  The fineness of life ought to be felt and expressed in student behaviour.  Yet how often it is not!

Another way in which the ideals of a school or college are misrepresented is by lack of intellectual integrity.  Any school informed with a large spirit wishes to meet its students on a platform of absolute trust,—­a platform which makes precautions against dishonesty unnecessary.  Just so long as a school must be vigilant in order to keep a few students from unfair behaviour, just so long is it prevented from meeting them all on a basis of absolute trust.  Why should girls excuse themselves for classroom dishonesty?  What would they think of a girl who cheated in basket-ball?  Would they condone that?  Until student government has recognized absolute intellectual integrity as a part of its ideas, it will not have achieved its end.  The rock on which all scholarship is founded is honour.  Lack of honour is fatal to its ideal.  “Cribbing,” often excused by people who do not stop to think, is the small beginning of a big evil.

Many a large institution is like an anxious mother, not always infallible in wisdom, but personally interested in and eager for the success of the individual.  A successful girl brings credit to her school, for she demonstrates, as nothing else can, the fact that the school is achieving its purpose in service to the community.  How much this encouragement is needed, girls do not realize, for they do not know all the difficulties which institutions, especially technical and collegiate, have to meet in sending their students out into the world.  In finding a position for a student, the school has to consider the whole girl.  It may care greatly for an attractive personality and yet see that its possessor is lacking in qualities of faithfulness and accuracy, and that with its utmost endeavour it has never been able to correct these faults.  On the other hand, the school may have those students whose manners, whose dress, whose personality, whose spelling, whose awkwardly expressed notes, whose lack of promptness, make against success in any capacity.