Student Ideals by Mrs. Hattie B. Howell

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 10, 1907

Student Ideals

By Mrs. Hattie B. Howell

As yet my own college days are not so remote that all the youthful ideals of my student life have lost their freshness and sweetness. It is a delightful thing to live in the “grand perhaps” of youth, and to think the “legions of thrilling thoughts” which usher in the mysteries of the untried future. “Thought,” it has been said, “is the measure of life.” Ideal thinking, then, has potency for ideal living. To live above the level of our thoughts is contrary to natural law in the spiritual world. “As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Youth is our golden opportunity for indelibly garnishing the walls of the mind with pure, lovely, noble, lofty ideals, worthy, as the years go by, of becoming living, speaking, acting souls dwelling in the earthly habitation.

Student ideals pertain to matters and things which are of peculiar interest to students, to schools, to teachers, to study, to preparation for life, to every influence which makes for the development of the man which is in the boy, and of the woman which is in the girl.

That which we think would afford us complete satisfaction if attained to, constitutes an ideal to us. Our ideals are in conformance to our tastes; and in proportion to our possibilities for the development of our higher tastes, they may be the progression of our ideals. As the mountain climber finds rising above each new peak gained, another which it was impossible for him to see from any lower point, so for the student each new summit opens to his mental vision greater heights and loftier motives for his endeavors. He is not farther away from his ideal, but its rate of advance is equal to his own. He sees his ideal always just a little above him, on a mount of transfiguration, beckoning him to climb. If in harmony with the sentiment of the motto of this convention, our highest aim is “to love Him, to imitate him, to be like him,” the One “altogether lovely,” then to us there comes a time when we shall be satisfied, a time when we shall awake in his likeness.

Some ideals approach too near to imaginary quantities to be worth reckoning with in the mathematics of life. But an ideal which is real enough to be clothed with flesh, or as Bulwer Lytton puts it, “embodies what is possible to man,” but “what is not common to mankind,” may be very helpful to us in the problem of life.

To be well educated should be every student’s ideal, that out of his well-furnished intellect he may more liberally dispense God’s gifts to him. A miser was never any man’s ideal, I am sure. The poor rich man who exclaimed, “What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?” had not learned that “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth;” nor yet the truth of Huxley’s saying that “the great end of life is not knowledge, but action.” God exhorts every man to add to his virtue knowledge, and having freely received, freely to give. Education is power, but “he hath no power that hath not power to use.”

Education is a very broad term. It pertains not alone to books, libraries, lectures, study, school, etc., because every man is to a greater or less extent self-educated. Upon you, whose future is yet mostly before you, I wish to impress these words of George Eliot: “Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.” Each thought and act wears in our brain a groove which helps to shape the next thought and action, and thus the habits grow, and the character is molded. Whether good or ill, the grooves into ruts are worn; and what is so strong as the power of early habit? That youth who furrows his brain with godlessness, frivolity, lightness, and dishonesty shall of his sowing reap the increase in maturer years. The principles which constrain you in your student life, are the principles which will actuate you when student days are over. Show us the boy, and we see the man; show us the girl, and we see the woman.

Dear student friend, select your companions, be they people, or be they books, or be they schools. A good school and a good schoolmaster are of great value to a student, and to my mind a good boarding-school is capable of doing much to solidify and idealize a student’s character. Of course I am speaking of a good school, an approximately ideal place. In spite of their best intentions and plans, parents are seldom able to execute any very systematic program for the home, and so the happy routine of boarding-school life has a large place to fill in the character making of the student. A good school can no more make a pupil an unselfish, thoughtful, industrious, thorough, economical man than it can convert him, but just as a Christian school frequently becomes the schoolmaster which leads the youth to Christ, so it furnishes a wholesome tonic to earnest effort, which, like bracing mountain air, makes for strength. Development, “along the lines of least resistance,” affords us no more moral strength than it does physical. The man who expects to make his mark in the athletic world places himself under a rigorous trainer. Is there less reason for young men and women who are pressing toward the mark of a higher calling, placing themselves where there is daily constant insistence upon performances which neither their inclination nor, perhaps, convictions would otherwise lead them to do? The ideal boarding-school excludes the luxurious as akin to the sensual, and adopts simplicity as the charm of an institution as well as of an individual.

The same principles which are always true of institutions, the same spirit which can make a student or a teacher ideal, are the only things which can make a school ideal. The student who has caught the spirit of one of our great presidents, who said he would rather sit upon one end of a log with Mark Hopkins on the other for his teacher, than to attend the university without Mark Hopkins, has got the student spirit. The essence of the good school lies not in its reputation, its endowment, its equipment. The “finishing school,” so called, has quite missed the ideal. Unfortunately those opportunities which only decorate the manner rather than the character, are overestimated, particularly by the young. “These ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.” Matt. 23:23.

MRS. HATTIE B. HOWELL.

(To be concluded)