VII

FAIR-PLAY


Few students realize how closely a classroom resembles a commonwealth.
To most of us it seems a place into which we go to have a certain amount
got out of us, or put into us. This conception of the classroom is
unworthy the modern girl who has, otherwise, a fine understanding of the
meaning of team-play, of playing all together for a common end, a game
or a republic united by a tacit compact.

Does the average student feel responsibility for the game of basket-ball
or lawn hockey which she is playing? The first thought of the girl in
answering this is that it was a foolish question even to ask. Of course
she does. But for her classroom? No, that is a different sort of game,
in which the responsibility lies all on the shoulders of the instructor.
It is a one-woman or a one-man game, and very often the students are
but spectators, cheering or indifferent, approving or disapproving. The
pupil does not hold herself accountable for this game; it is the teacher
who makes the class "go," who extracts from each student the information
bottled up in her, together, often, with a good deal of carbon
dioxide,--a process difficult and hard as drawing a swollen cork out of
a soda-water bottle. Finally, with a sort of noble rebound of effort,
the exhausted instructor is to put a vast deal of information back into
the girl before the student claps her book together and rushes pell-mell
to the next classroom, there to be similarly uncorked, if the teacher
has learned the art and her mental muscle is sufficient.