Excerpt from Student Customs
The very word leisure with the halo of conceptions about it has a unique charm in this world of toil, moil and drudgery. It is the literal meaning of the Greek word school. It suggests the eternal paradise of childhood. There might be a vigorous plea for a kind of biological aristocracy whose wealth freed them from the need of refraining from what they want to do and doing what they do not wish to do. Such a class, left to the utter freedom of their own inclinations and isolated from all perturbations, might serve as an ethnic compass to point out the direction of human destiny. We could thus cast the human horoscope from what those best by birth and heredity most strongly preferred to do, think and feel. This condition would, however, for the most part be only a prolongation through life of the conditions which actually do prevail in school and college, where picked youth and maidens are protected from the necessities of self-support, exempted from competition, business and to some extent from social restraint, and within the largest practicable limits left free to follow their own will. A strange, fascinating polymorphic human seminarium it is. A chapter might be written upon the effects of the new freedom as seen in the choice of subjects under the elective system alone, and the complex reciprocities and compromises between studies that are supposed to fit for something later and those which have immediate interest.
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