Missionary teachers, with their students eager to get anything they have to give, are not to be pitied. Our schools and their groups of teachers in isolated and uncultivated parts of the West and South are not to be pitied. Even if education is with them shorn of much that gives it charm, the opportunities that come are prized. Students and teachers have intellectual joy in the work they do, and without that the greatest university in the world might as well, or better, be a district school, for then the work done would be truly useful. It is the teacher who has to put much of her time and energy into making a subject superficially attractive enough for a student to elect it, who is to be pitied. A classroom full of blasé girls whose minds need to be tickled before there is the least expression of intellectual mirth upon their faces, is an ordeal not lightly to be met except by the professional joker or academic tumbler.
Girls often become impatient with themselves, and that is one reason why there is so little joy in work for them. Think of Helen Keller as a famous example of this joy in work under the most adverse circumstances. What could be greater than her handicap? Shut away from the world by deaf ears and blind eyes and, for a while, by inability to speak, she has nevertheless shown a keenness of pleasure and intellectual acquisition that shames us who have all our senses in their fullness. Think of her patient, unremitting delving, of the digging up, up, up to get to the light which most human beings are privileged to enjoy with no effort at all! The mind that accepts this wealth with no thought, no sense of responsibility, is a trifler with riches that are about us for God-given purposes. Think of the way in which Stevenson and John Richard Green and George Eliot rose above their ill-health and did their work in despite of it! Perhaps some of us have superb health and have never made any conscious effort to use that gift for a high end.
Girls grow impatient with themselves when they wouldn't be impatient with a little child. Yet the mind has to be trained even as we train a child; it has to be brought back and back, again and again to the thing to be done. After the asking of a simple question, oftentimes a whole class will look confounded, because they have some strange notion that thinking means getting hold of something very far away and difficult to grasp. All that the first effort in thought denotes is taking a hold of that which is nearest and following it up. It is the old story of Theseus following his clue of thread, the slender thing in his hand, by which he was guided out of the labyrinth and to the broad sea of adventure.