Havergal College - Magazine Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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Havergal College Magazine good style and methods. Slovenly thinking is as bad as slovenly, blotted writing. Try to hold, as well as catch. Only by hold- ing and adding to your store of carefully acquired thoughts will your mind grow strong to develop its own contribution to the general fund of thought. And this we call originality. Then, and then only, will your Literature and History and Scrip- ture notes be something more than repetitions of notes taken in class. This Power of Thought is worth some sacrifice, for it will guide your way through the problems of life as well as through the puzzles of the school-room. But you cannot hurry it, and the price must be paid during months and years of thorough- ness and earnest work. Sit. down and count the cost. It will absolutely bar society engagements on School days, and inter- ruptions, including long telephone chats, on week-day evenings. It will not allow you to crowd unnecessary engagements into a day that is sufficiently full with School work, games or other exercise, and piano practice. It will show you that part of Saturday morning should be spent in preparation or practice, if you are not to be too late at your evening study on other nights of the week. It will convince you that visits to the dentist, oculist and dressmaker can and should be made during the holi- days or on Saturdays, and should never interfere with lessons or preparation. You know that you cannot crowd your lives with so many activities without over-straining mind or body. Take your courage and common-sense in both hands and drive out from this time the little foxes which spoil our Winnipeg vines, and give yourself heart and soul to the work in the vine- yard of your life, otherwise your crop will come far behind in quantity and quality. Examinations are not the final goal in education, and you may pull through these with marks to spare, and yet have a mind only half trained in power to think. The Power of Thought — what will it do in the boarding- school? It will make girls reason that where there is civiliz- ation there must always be law, and that to keep laws makes for one ' s health. This hardly sounds inspiring, but there is much behind that single thought. AVith thinking power come imagin- ation, sympathy and their heavenly sister, insight. These are great artists : make them your friends for life. They can show you how many colours lie behind what you call grey — the grey of everyday life, and they will open your eyes to gold and blue and crimson where you never would have seen them. They scorn the camera, and paint portraits for you of the girls and teachers among whom you live, with their joys and sorrows, their hopes and fears and doubts looking through their eyes, as Rembrandt painted them long ago. And above all, they will not let you think about yourself, for these three fair sisters, Imagination, Sympathy and Insight, know tfral this means dis- 13

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Havergal College Magazine and Arithmetic as in basket-ball and gymnastics. We want you to set yourselves seriously to conquer that lack of thoroughness and finish which so often spoils your work. This is a defect which in some cases runs right through your record of daily performances, your thoughts, words and deeds. It is partly the result, I suppose, of the hurried, active life of our country, but we all — ' grown-ups and younger people — need to guard our- selves from hasty, inaccurate thinking, slovenly, careless speak- ing, and imperfect doing. Real scholarship calls for a high standard of accuracy, a distrust of all that is showy and super- ficial, an honest pride in doing one ' s best, and undiscouraged pati- ence through all difficulties. And first and foremost, it calls for all your mind and all your powers, and not that little corner of it which some of you so grudgingly give to your school -room work. Self-denial and hard work are the price you must pay for the education which will make Western Canada take her place on equal terms with older lands. You never like to hear an astonished new-comer remark on the achievements of Scotch or English or German girls as compared with your own. Sometimes the comparison is scarcely fair, for many of you can do prac- tical work which your cousins across the water are not called to do, and would be puzzled to begin. Only last term, I was impressed by the calmness and good sense of a girl summoned to travel alone from here to Buffalo to nurse her invalid mother, and was most relieved to hear how successfully she accomplished both the long wear y journey and the trying duties at the end of it. But again, it is wholesome for you to realise, even if you do not like the thought, that in schools and other places where a girl ' s whole energy and interest is given to her education she gains a firmer grasp, a stronger judgment, and a better quality of brain and thought than can ever be won by the slack and half-hearted. You have plenty of opinions, to be sure, but they will not be worth much, now or later, unless there is a power of thought behind them which only belongs to the trained mind. All the way up the School there is a sharp line of division between the girl whose mind is obedient to the laws of reasoning so far as she has grasped them, and the girl with a nighty, disobedient mind which will not do what is required of it. You have to break your mind, and your will, too, as a horse is broken, not by violence, but by gentle, steady, daily discipline. You must wrestle with your difficulty yourself till it is no longer a difficulty: and this without hurry or fuss or repeated cries for aid. The habit of wrestling with, instead of dodging, difficulties is a really valuable one to acquire for the rest of your life. Superficial ' ' is a word I hear too often round the School when your work or character is being judged. That is the tendency which makes you seek short cuts in mathe- matics, and answers that will bring in marks instead of showing 12

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Havergal College Magazine ease and death for them, and poverty for your own soul. They will teach you how to laugh at small troubles, and to help others in great ones. They will show you the beauty of gentleness, and courtesy and orderliness, and the holiness of self-sacrifice. Ruskin was sitting at their feet when he wrote of women and girls as the guardians of order, health, beauty and love. See how high he puts order, and remember it when you are next tempted to leave clothes on the floor, and books or candy on the bed! Without Thought and her three sisters the seniors will never understand why they must loyally stand for School traditions and discipline as leaders and not unwilling or lazy followe rs. They will certainly never understand why practices of doubtful benefit, such as writing to girls in other boarding schools, writing to boys, reading third-rate novels, bed-room feasting and nibbling between meals, and endless conversation on clothes and entertainments, are discouraged among us. Yet these are things which every girl should reason out for herself. Little foxes again, and dangerous ones, which spoil your taste and habits and refinement. How can seniors lead and shape the younger set if they tacitly or openly condone these things? You must be ahead of others to lead at all. I wish we .ill, young and old, had a dread of being second-rate in mind and thought — at least as great a horror as most of us seem to have of wearing an old-fashioned or dowdy hat ! Yet the brain under the hat is so much more important than what is outside it. You are not educated till you understand that. And why should we toil in the vineyard, when to dream over the wall in the sunshine or to play with the little tame foxes for an hour or two would be so much easier? Well, it is for the Cause. Many years ago, when women were striv- ing to secure for girls as good an education as for boys, the growing daughter of two very gifted parents was constantly stopped when thoughtless and unruly by a cry from her mother Remember the Cause! The Cause was the higher education of girls of which many thought them incapable ; and the cry was to remind a clever, untidy girl that onlookers would judge all girls asking for education by her own behaviour. That Cause was a great one, but yours is even higher. The trained mind and hand and eye which your education is to bring you are to be used for the service of this great new Dominion of which you are so proud. That is what it all leads up to — work for yourself, work for your home, for your class and your School, for your church. All faithful, thoughtful work really helps Canada. What are you willing to give to Canada, present and future? A little thought, a great deal of talk, a verse of O Canada, and later on when you have left school, a little help in the 14