Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 March 1896 — The Ideal Schoolboy. [ARTICLE]

The Ideal Schoolboy.

The ideal schoolboy is an orderly ma-. chine, always obedient, receptive, submissive, ready in the cricket field and with real or simulated enthusiasm, for football, despising’ all other games, and conservative to the backbone. He is of the master, who sends him home with glowing reports and arms full of prize books. It seems never to occur to anyone that there may be natures to which the classical languages and history make no appeal, Who have not the gift of the'mathematician and who do not even care to play at cricket or football. If such appear in a public school they have a bad time of it, dragging out their miserable days at the bottom of the form, regarded' as fools by the masters-and as muffs by the boys. And yet among these schooL failures there may be Liebigs or Darwins, or, at any rate,.there may be, and commonly there is, the material out of which good and useful citizens are made, if only they hada chance to show what they can do.—Nature. • «