The high schools are expected to fit ninety-five per cent. of their charges for life and five per cent. for college. If our boy and girl are of the ninety and five, we demand very early specialization toward their precious careers, wax enthusiastic over the school’s model mercantile and banking establishment, expand to know our children are being dosed with a course in “Civics,” generously admire the history note-books in which they have spread much tinted ink over a little stereotyped information, and in what we fool ourselves into believing are the margins to all these matters proudly watch them capture a class numeral or a school letter, grumblingly pay for real estate signs that have gone up in flame to celebrate some epochal victory, and bear with their antics during hazings and initiations. It’s a democratic country, and if the poor man’s son cannot go to college, why the college must come to him. Nor are we without a certain undemocratic satisfaction in the thought that he has stolen a four years’ march into business over the rich man’s son, who spends his college hours, we assure ourselves, acquiring habits that will leave him weak in the hour of competition. Meanwhile the straddling masters are cramming the other five with all the dates and rules and verbs and prose passages which long and bitter experience has demonstrated to be likeliest on entrance examinations. From the classrooms, as term follows term with its endless iteration of short advances and long reviews, there rises the bruit of rivalry: masters decorously put forward the claims of their own colleges; pupils rejoice when their future alma mater notches another athletic victory to the well-remembered tally; the weak of heart are urging upon their bewildered parents the superior merits of the “back-door” route to some exacting university--by certificate to a small college and transfer at the end of the first year. There are high schools in whose cases all this is understatement; and of course there are innumerable others, especially in these days when the most rigorous colleges have lost a little of their faith in entrance examinations, where it is absurd overstatement. Nevertheless your son, if he goes to a representative Eastern college from a representative high school, goes as a man steals second in the seventh. And his subsequent instructors marvel at the airy nonchalance with which he ignores “the finer things of life”!