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 because thou
oughtest." Fichte said that _Faulheit, Feigheit_, and _Falschheit_
[Laziness, cowardice, falsehood] were the three dishonorable things
for students. If they would study the history and enter into the
spirit of their own fraternities, they would often have keener and
broader ideas of honor to which they are happily so sensitive.
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