Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/196

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meet incoming freshmen with unerring recognition and condescension. Sometimes he adapts himself too incompletely to his new environment. It is as much a fault to cling rigidly to one's home manners and habits and dress as it is to throw these to the winds and adopt the extremes of college customs and fads. In the unimportant things of college life it is well for the freshman to keep his eyes open and to "do as the Romans do"; it is not wise for him, however, on his return home at Thanksgiving to attempt to reproduce and to establish the customs of Rome in his home community.

The differences between high school and college are marked. The methods of work and the ways of living are quite different from those in high school—quite different in fact, from what the boy thinks they are. It is not surprising that a high school boy's idea of college life is an erroneous one. What he knows of college he has most frequently gained from the exaggerated accounts of student escapades which he has seen in the newspapers, or from the stories which he has heard related by his big brother or a local athlete who has returned home from the scenes of his scholastic triumphs. Such tales are usually unhampered by facts, and concern themselves more with the unusual and the unimportant things of college than with its real work. If he has visited college at all it has more than likely been at the time of an important athletic contest, or of an interscholastic meet, when nobody works, or talks of work, and when the main thing under consider-