Rollins College - Tomokan Yearbook (Winter Park, FL)

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3n Hfomartam JOHN CLEMENT MacNUTT MARGARET JEAN MYERS THOMAS WALKER TRAMMELL RICHARD HAYWARD LOUIS BOISOT HENRY HERMAN WESTINGHOUSE

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LEARNING President Hamilton Holt This year I visited half a hundred of the great preparatory schools who coach students to pass the College Entrance Requirement Board examina- tions required by Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vassar, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, etc. I asked all the headmasters what proportion of the questions the College Entrance Require- ment Board asked were memory questions and what were thought questions. The consensus of opinion, virtually unanimous, was that, taking the examinations as a whole, about seventy-five percent were memory questions and twenty-five percent thought questions. In other words, these institutions of learning, whose chief excuse for existence is to prepare students for life, regard what a student can remember as three times as important as how he can think. And as to how he will act, which is more im- portant than either, there are no tests. This raises the question as to what are the measures of success in life? Any man who succeeds must overcome innumerable obstacles and solve countless problems. They come in a never-ending series during his entire life. The first thing one does when confronted with a problem is to concentrate the mind on it. He scrutinizes, contemplates, weighs, compares, verifies, in fact, goes through all the mental processes that lead to truth. Suppose he goes through these processes and does not arrive at truth but at error? All successful men do that occasionally. But if he arrives at error many times he will be a failure. Suppose, however, he arrives at truth and stops there? Even then he will not be a successful man. He will be merely a dilettante. The successful man must not only think, he must act. But the minute a man begins to act, results follow, and when results follow, anyone can see those results. A man may have competitors or enemies, and they will try to thwart those results, and they will do it by any means, fair or foul. They may employ ridicule, sarcasm, ostracism. They may appeal to law, they may threaten jail. Thus, before anyone can succeed, he must think and think straight, which is mental, and act courageously, which is moral. , If a student has not learned to think straight and act courageously in school, then he must learn in college ; if he has not learned in college, then he must learn in life ; and if he does not learn in life, then he is doomed to work for somebody else and not for himself, and to hold fourth, fifth, or sixth rate jobs to the end of his days. Has Rollins helped you to think straight and act courageously?