Explore "Talks to Freshman Girls" by Helen Dawes Brown on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"Do we make real readers of our students?" was the anxious question of a college president. I remembered his phrase when I read his annual report. "Most of these young people," he said, "are to go out into ordinary life, into general pursuits, where the one chance of their maintaining their intellectual growth will come through stimulating them in these years to interest in some particular line which they may continue, in the midst of the general pressure of social, domestic, or professional life. Unless a student learn to read and love books, she will, in a large majority of cases, be thrown out of all relation to resources that are in any fair sense of the word intellectual." He pleaded that to make a girl a real reader is to safeguard her intellectual life.
A student leaves college, not perhaps having read much, but knowing what she wants to read. Her education has been an appetizer; now she is invited to partake of the banquet.