Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/192

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

mother, undertakes to decide for him in most critical emergencies and, though the judgment of the older person is likely to be more dependable than that of the younger, there is no training for the boy in depending upon his elders' judgment.

The boy from the west will often gain an advantage by going to an eastern institution for his education. Not that he will be better taught there, or live in a more refined or a rarer intellectual atmosphere, but because he will meet different sorts of people, he will need to adjust himself to quite different conditions from those to which he has been used, and he will get a broader outlook upon life. Such an experience will not be at all likely to make him dissatisfied with his own particular part of the country, but on the contrary will cause him to value it more highly. When I go to the mountains I always come back to the prairies with a sense of joy and satisfaction.

For this reason the New Englander or the Southerner would often be immeasurably benefited by taking his college training in the west. It would modify his provincialism, it would disabuse his mind of the idea that the most of the United States lies east of the Hudson river or south of Mason and Dixon's line, it would humanize him and teach him democracy, and, best of all, if he chooses his college wisely, it would give him as excellent a training as he could get anywhere else in the country, and often at considerably less expense.

Each college has its own traditions, its own atmosphere,