Letters from a Father to His Son Entering…

The first principle of college life is the principle of doing one's duty. In your appreciation of scholarship, your first duty is to learn your lessons. I have known many college men who learned their lessons, who yet failed to get from the college all that they ought to get. But I have never known a man who failed to get his lessons, whatever else he may have got, to receive the full advantage of the course. The curriculum of every good college is the resultant of scores or of hundreds of years of reflection and of trial. It represents methods, content, purposes, which many teachers through many experiments of success and of failure have learned are the best forces for training mind and for forming character.

But for the student to receive worthy advantage from these forces he is obliged to relate himself to them by hard intellectual attention and application. Sir Leslie Stephen says that the Cambridge teachers of his time were not given to enthusiasms, but preached common-sense, and common-sense said: "Stick to your triposes, grind at your mill, and don't set the universe in order till you have taken your bachelor's degree." The duty of the American college student is no less evident. He is to stick to his triposes. His triposes are his lessons. Among the greatest of all teachers was Louis Agassiz. A story has become classical as told by the distinguished naturalist, the late Dr. Samuel H. Scudder, regarding the methods of the great teacher with his students.