Necessity of Learning Submission to Discipline.
By Editor
THE following from the San Francisco Chronicle is worthy of being read by boys (and girls too) in other cities than San Francisco. We are glad to assist in placing it before them:— "School circles are agitated over a mutiny in the High School. It seems that some of the boys in that institution have for some time evinced a disposition to be insubordinate. They have held meetings and denounced certain rules adopted by the teachers as calculated to crush out American manhood, and having started out on this high key they fetched up by stealing two books in which were kept the records of demerits. The case is under examination by a committee of the board of education, and may possibly lead to the suspension of some of the young culprits. "It is well that a few plain truths and a little common sense should reach the boys of San Francisco from a source outside of their regular teachers. A great many of them have imbibed and are growing up with utterly false views of life. They are careless about their manners, foul in their language, lacking in proper respect for their parents and their superiors. There have been occasions where young school-boys in this city have helped to commit outrages on defenseless people which would have disgraced a Feejean. All this grows out of a false conception of life. Books are very little in life in comparison with behavior. A boy may be able to recite the 'Young Lochinvar' to perfection, but if he goes out in the street afterward and begins to swear like a ruffian, his elocution will not help in the struggle for a living. He will not get on. Nor will it avail him to understand Cicero if he don't understand how to treat his father and his sisters, and ladies and gentlemen generally. It is gentle manners and kindness of heart and respectful demeanor which push a boy forward in the world far better than book-learning or arithmetic. A wise boy will try first to grow up to be a man and a gentleman; scholarship may come afterward. "This idea, which has sometimes been put forth in Eastern colleges as well as in the San Francisco High School, that severe discipline degrades American manhood, is the sheerest nonsense. The truest American citizen is he who obeys the law without question. What the law is to men, school regulations are to boys. A boy who is insubordinate because he does not like the regulations framed for the government of his school, will rebel against the laws when he grows to be a man, and will fetch up where other law-breakers do, or ought to do. There is no degradation in obedience. There is no sacrifice of American manhood in submission to authority. School-boys will find, when they grow up, that life is one long term of obedience to some authority or other, and they will also find that men who cannot obey are never fitted to command. It happens to all of us to have, at times, to obey orders which we disapprove, and to submit to rules which are irksome; but only those who are equally destitute of common sense and experience think of following South American example and starting a revolution whenever things do not go exactly to suit."