Such a conception of a classroom is not fair-play. The teacher, like the
coxswain of a college crew, may have rowed over the same course and she
may know it well enough to cover it in the dark; she may have won
distinction upon it, may be the fittest person in all the states of the
Union to cover it again, but if she has not a good or a winning crew to
coach, she will never win any race, even the shortest. No instructor has
shoulders equal to such a multiple burden as coaching, steering and
doing all the rowing, too. To play any classroom game in this spirit is
to be dead weight for every one else embarked upon the same adventure.
It is not fair-play.

By such an attitude on the part of merely one student in the class,
every other student associated with her loses, for the girl who will not
lift her own weight the others must carry. If that student were playing
in that spirit on the basket-ball team, do you suppose that the coach,
or the captain, would let her stay on? Not for a moment; off she would
go and very much humiliated, too. If it is a discussion, the touch and
go of the whole recitation will depend upon the presence of the
team-play, or fair-play, spirit in the course. The instructor may do her
best but if there is no play-the-game in that classroom, she might just
as well fold up her tent, like the proverbial Arab, "and silently steal
away." It is not that any recitation need be a brilliant affair--if most
of them depended upon that for existence they would scarcely exist at
all--but there must be an honest, earnest, responsible effort to make
the best of the hour. Good will inevitably come from the clarifying
effort to express thought, and the leading from thought to thought as
the work goes forward.

The basket-ball team cannot win, or even play, unless all the members