Student life and organizations. Student life is perhaps the best of all fields,
unworked though it is, for studying the natural history of adolescence. Its
modern record is over eight hundred years old and it is marked with the
signatures of every age, yet has essential features that do not vary. Cloister and
garrison rules have never been enforced even in the hospice, bursa, inn, "house,"
"hall," or dormitory, and in loco parentis [In place of a parent] practises are
impossible, especially with large numbers. The very word "school" means
leisure, and in a world of toil and moil suggests paradise. Some have urged that
élite youth, exempt from the struggle to live and left to the freedom of their own
inclinations, might serve as a biological and ethnic compass to point out the goal
of human destiny. But the spontaneous expressions of this best age and condition
of life, with no other occupation than their own development, have shown
reversions as often as progress. The rupture of home ties stimulates every wider
vicarious expression of the social instinct. Each taste and trait can find congenial
companionship in others and thus be stimulated to more intensity and self-
consciousness. Very much that has been hitherto repressed in the adolescent soul
is now reënforced by association and may become excessive and even
aggressive. While many of the race-correlates of childhood are lost, those of this
stage are more accessible in savage and sub-savage life. Freedom is the native
air and vital breath of student life. The sense of personal liberty is absolutely
indispensable for moral maturity; and just as truth can not be found without the
possibility of error, so the posse non peccare [Ability not to sin] precedes the
non posse peccare, [Inability to sin] and professors must make abroad
application of the rule abusus non tollit usum [Abuse does not do away with
use]. The student must have much freedom to be lazy, make his own minor
morals, vent his disrespect for what he can see no use in, be among strangers to
act himself out and form a personality of his own, be baptized with the
revolutionary and skeptical spirit, and go to extremes at the age when excesses
teach wisdom with amazing rapidity, if he is to become a true knight of the spirit
and his own master. Ziegler[29] frankly told German students that about one-
tenth of them would be morally lost in this process, but insisted that on the
whole more good was done than by restraint; for, he said, "youth is now in the
stage of Schiller's bell when it was molten metal."
Of all safeguards I believe a rightly cultivated sense of honor is the most
effective at this age. Sadly as the written code of student honor in all lands needs
revision, and partial, freaky, and utterly perverted, tainted and cowardly as it
often is, it really means what Kant expressed in the sublime precept, "Thou canst