Shawnigan Lake School - Yearbook (Shawnigan Lake, British Columbia Canada)

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Shawnigan Lake School Magazine EDITORIAL » IN the Library there is an insignificant little green book, which is probably not taken off the shelf from year ' s end to year ' s end. It contains the letters, written forty years ago, of a merchant to his son. The father was a self-made man, having acquired his wealth by transforming pigs into bacon, hams and sausages at the Chicago stockyards. The first letter in the book is the one he wrote to his son when the latter went into residence at Harvard, where there was plenty of education to be got, and he urged his son not to be bashful when it was handed round, but to reach out and take a big helping; for education was the one thing lying around loose in the world that a fellow could have as much of as he was willing to haul away. The father ' s views become even more interesting as the letter proceeds. The first thing that any education ought to give a man is character, and the second thing is education. . . . I ' m anxious that you should be a good scholar, but I ' m more anxious that you should be a good clean man. And if you graduate with a sound conscience, I shan ' t care so much if there are a few holes in your Latin. There are two parts of a college education — the part that you get in the schoolroom, and the part that you get outside it. That ' s the really important part. For the first can only make you a scholar, while the second can make you a man. To the majority in British Columbia today the first function of a school is to pass boys through their matriculation, people being under the delusion that their children, having attained this standing, are educated. This year Shawnigan Lake School passes its twenty-first birthday. For twenty-one years this School has been passing boys through matriculation with increasingly higher results, which will stand comparison with any school in the Province. But matriculation has never been the sole objective. As this is a boarding school, the members of it, masters and boys, are thrown very much together outside the classroom, so that the part of education which boys derive from a community life is also developed — a side of their education often too little appreciated by them whilst actually at school. And it is true to say that for twenty-one years the primary aim and object of this School has been to give boys character: to enable them to graduate as men and gentlemen.