Page 4 Scribulus Winter Issue ters singing clearly through her voilin. Emily looked at the end of her finger through the hole in her glove. Little ridges of black stood up like tar boiled in a great fat-bellied pot. But Mr. Ellery did not understand when she tried to tell him about practicing. The words cowered ashamed in the blackest recess of her throat. It couldn't be explained this listlessness like some slow poison slipping heavily against the walls of every vein, soaking silently, implacably, in the ball of every joint. It was good to feel crimson rebellion flaring savagely through her heart, clear white resolve searing deep trails through her brain. But this something, this great blind something, moved irrevocably, endlessly, silently around in her whole body . . . And she sat, eating a slice of bread and marmalade, perhaps, hating herself with a malevolent hatred, mocking this blind encroacher but still sitting. . . No, Mr. Ellery expected her to go on the concert stage if she practiced long enough, and hard enough . . . There would be the great bare theatre, flame-bright curtains; a single round of very white light fixed unwinking on her and the violin. But no, she wouldn't matter at all. Only a sad, sweet ecstasy flinging itself thinly into high nothingness, sobbing out impotently man's wild longing and his failure. And now a ladybug had stuck herself on the leaf, caught in the little area of sticky substance stirred up by Emily's finger. Carefully she extricated the unhappy ladybug, watched its quick flight to a leaf three twigs above. There was a bank of clouds in the blue north, clouds puffed and piled endlessly, lurking with purples, spun-sugar pinks, clear blues, bathed over with a thin golden glow like a saffron sauce on some fine Christmas pudding. Somehow, the clouds got behind Emily's eyes, stayed there. That was what life was for: to see such clouds, to listen to the overtones and undercurrents of a weeping violin . . . She didn't ask much more only a small place, a quaint house, like a squat, grey mushroom sprung up in an old garden, candleshine at twilight and a transient silver sliding past the window-panes. A still, clean, quiet place, "like a forest growing." These clouds now, and their dream pro-vokings, made the dream more of reality than the house just beyond the vacant lot. It was one among many frame houses. Gray paint leaned forlornly away from the wood just under the west rain-gutter. Three under-weight posts held up the porch roof and joined three railings. There were two steps leading to the door. Emily did not like the porch posts or the paint, and the glass in the windows was opaque, giving back trees and cars and people in unexpected lumps and wrinkles. But the house blurred now, its outlines wavered. Nor did she notice the automobile standing at the curbing as she went up the walk and onto the porch. '1 Father will be happy when I tell him,'' she thought as she entered the narrow hall and started for the stairs. "He'll be glad that Mr. Ellery thinks I can do something big with my music. Maybe now he can even make Mother see that all my time won't be wasted." The door into the living room creaked. Emily paused with a foot in mid-air. "Come in and see your Aunt Sarah, Emily.'' Then in a lower tone Mrs. Spargo continued. "And I do wish you'd try to act decent. I can't see why you have to shut up like a clam every time your Aunt Sarah comes. They'll think you're terribly bad-mannered. I can't see why you don't like" "All right, Mother. I'm coming." She laid her books on the spotted brocade scarf on the hall table and followed her mother into the room. As she touched passive lips to Aunt Continued on page 17 Winter Issue Scribulus Page 5 ON THE PROCESS OF UNLEARNING By Willard Hall A college is not a dispensary of knowledge. We do not come to college to be told by professors and text books what is and what is not. Education is not a process through which we add constantly to a store of known facts which keep arranging themselves into a consistent universe. For each item of apparent fact is valueless without interpretation ; each must be put in its perspective according to a theory or a philosophy or a scheme of life. The service of the college is that it provides a sorting house for all these theories, philosophies and schemes of life. It is a melting pot of ideas. Here the professors and the sudents and the authors of books interchange their interpretations of existence and give their separate answers to life's insistent questions. The answers are diverse. The interpretations are divergent. And from all the chaos of conflicting explanations that pour forth from the classroom, the laboratory and the library, each student must select those which seem to him most reasonable and must perfect from them his personal philosophy. In the educational process the most mature concepts, the most advanced interpretations are saved for us until we arrive in college. The impact of new ideas upon the student is increasingly powerful until at last in college he is brought in contact with all the modes of our modern day. Above all, perhaps, science that revolutionary method of finding and testing fact is first presented to him in all its drastic implication when he arrives in college. That is why it is so utterly amazing that a certain type of student can come to college and ignore completely the whole mass of modern conflicting thought. He graduates in due course of time, enters business, makes a brilliant success of himself, grows old and finally dies all without ever changing a major conception. The religion he learned when he was eight years old still rests deep in his heart; the "American system" of economics described to him in the fifth grade still is enshrined within him; the definitions of virtue and fault adopted by his community still form his guiding code of conduct, and determine what books he chooses and what people he hears. There is not much intellectual and philosophical conflict in the world outside of college, and it is reasonably easy to avoid. So, if the student does not lose his eight-year-old religious philosophy, his ten-year-old moral philosophy, and his twelve-year-old social philosophy in college when the conflict is on all sides, he will never lose it. He will go through life as a child. He will never become educated. The process of unlearning is vital in an education, and the serious student must begin by overthrowing all the prejudices instilled in pre-college days. We hear that it is unsportsmanlike to take advantage of the weak and that it is ungentlemanly to strike men when there is no fighting back. But our adult friends who preach the high creed are the very ones who violated it most frequently in their treatment of us when we were younger. Not physically, no. They inflicted no bodily injury. But they inflicted on many of us an intellectual injury that is far more tragic. For as children we were not skeptical, and in our homes and our schools and our churches these adults vied with one another for the opporunity to indoctrinate us with their views before we were old enough to weigh and consider and select, to defend ourselves mentally. The students who have suffered from this indoctrination are all about us. We see them every day in school. We can recognize them by their smug certainty in the face of all the conflicting facts and ideas which are thrust at them. They know the answers. They can not bear the disturbance of recon-