Nichols School - Verdian Yearbook (Buffalo, NY)

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HEADMASTER'S MESSAGE Of considerable concern to the schoolmaster of today is the number of dropouts from college-dropouts that seem to be unusually heavy in the sophomore and junior years. These sad developments ring a strange tune on the ears of schoolmasters who were active in teaching before the war. In those years, colleges were not as overwhelmed by applicants as many of us suppose. Institutions which we think of as the most popular and competitive admit that in those years they found it necessary to scrape the bottom of the barrel in order to fill their freshman classes each year. As a result, they took too many chances in admitting questionable scholars. Not uncommon was it for us to see the beginning of the parade home of fiunkouts as early as Thanksgiving of the freshman year, a parade that was to continue down through June. With that background, you can well see how startling are these college departures which occur in the sophomore and junior years. What is more, they are severances that take place through no deficiency in scholarshipg at least the students have amply proved their ability to handle college work and handle it with competence. What, then, seems to be the underlying explanation? There seems to be no single answer. One seems to be that the boy puts his college on a pedestal far too lofty, and the college simply cannot come up to those glorified expectations. The boy has worked so hard and anguished so much over getting into college that it wears a halo in his eyes. Then, once in college he finds frequently that many of the teachers whom he has in the freshman year do not measure up to some that he had in school. In many instances, the boy may have been a very big gun on his school campus, recognized by all, and idolized by many. In college as he starts out he is quite nameless. As one boy put it: In school when I did a good job, someone would say 'Nice going'. Here I get Ais on some of my papers and the professor does not even make a comment. He left college largely because of hurt feelings. I am afraid that many of these boys who leave college in midstream have lost their direction temporarily. They have been exposed to iconoclastic ideas from friends and faculty and are cast adrift. Their maturity has not grown sufficiently to afford them stability and they are swept into a current they cannot fight. If boys who face these periods of unsettlement and uncertainty would just hang on, they would learn a valuable lesson. Many periods of bepuzzlement in our lives clarify in time if we just hold on to our faith and our purpose in life. Philip M. B. Boocock

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ASSOCIATE HEADMASTER In the curriculum of the Junior School increas- ing importance is being given to the development of original thinking and also self-expression. The new direction in the mathematics and science courses emphasizes reasoning rather than memo- rization. In science, experiments now play a pri- mary role and no longer serve merely to illustrate principles already studied. The work in English, history, and geography depends more and more on analysis, comparison, and the search for a point of view that can be documented and de- fended. The exciting new art department and the debating society are also important facets of the emphasis upon expression. We want our boys to be knowledgeable, but also alert and articulate. Pliny H. Hayes III 6 TgfZk,7,.,47