THE KING’S BUSINESS
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spent t c provide you a good educa tion. How .successful I have been you know better than anybody else. After mature reflection I have come to the conclusion that I have done for you, in that direction, all that can be reasonably expected of any parent, and I have called you in to tell you that you have now reached an age when you must take up the lines for yourself. If you have failed to profit by the advantages with which I have tried so hard to surround you, the re sponsibility must be vours. I shall not upbraid you for your neglect, but, rather, pity you for the indifference with which you have passed over the golden opportunities you have been enabled to enjoy through my indul gence.” The admonition was not lost! Young Wallace realized his mistake, and set himself manfully now to the task of making his own life count in the world. He began with the drudgery of copying court rec ords, endured for. months in a dingy, half-lighted room, receiving for his pay something like 10 cents a hun dred words. But he confesses that, “The very tediousness and regularity of the work became a needed drill, and set him in the direction of a prac tical education.” It is worth while to regard what John Ruskin has to say upon educa tional subjects, and this is one of his remarks: “Wholesome human em ployment is the first and best educa tion, mental as well as bodily.” That poor foreigner, whose miserable pit tance for a daily drudgery that would have degraded a beast, and which forced him to exclaim: “It is too late for me to learn; but my children, they shall be educated!” did not real ize that education means something more than mental drills, that it must involve the hand as well as the head, and train the judgment as surely as the intellect; and point the way while
tion to know the truth at any cost, and even at all cost, brings every stu dent, who has formed it, a long way toward that attainment. A Second Feature of This Progress Is Determination to Be Practical. Certainly, in our American schools, and to a considerable ext'ent in the. institutions of advanced learning, the world over, the emphasis is now be ing placed upon “practical education.” If fifty to a hundred years ago our schools sought to teach youth “how to think,” to-day they have coupled with that endeavor the decisive one of teaching “how to do.” The old sys tem may have looked entirely to cul ture; the new insists upon accomp lishment also. The reason for this change in emphasis is in the new order of society. Our fathers were the children of poverty for the most part, and the natural hardships of life compelled a practical education. The apprenticed boy did not need to be taught a trade by the schools; and the farmer’s son required no manual de partment, or agricultural addenda. By the appointments of the daily living he was in a polytechnic; but his chil dren and grandchildren are put in peril by the .lack of a field of com pelling practice. General Lew Wal lace, the famous author, frankly re ports his own experience along this line. He confesses to having been a poor student in his young manhood. He grew tired of his college course after six weeks and returned home. He records how his father called him into his office and took from a pigeon hole in his desk a package of papers neatly folded and tied with red tape. The papers were the receipts for Lew’s tuition! He called them off, item by item, and asked the lad to add them up. The total staggered him. Then the father said: “That sum, my son, represents what I have
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