The University of Hard Knocks [25]
roll of men and women of uniformly greater achievement.
I believe the most useful schools today are schools of struggle schools offering encouragement and facilities for young people to work their way thru and to act upon their own initiative.
Men Needed More Than Millions
We are trying a new educational experiment today.
The old "deestrick" school is passing, and with it the small academies and colleges, each with its handful of students around a teacher, as in the old days of the lyceum in Athens, when the pupils sat around the philosopher in the groves.
From these schools came the makers and the preservers of the nation.
Today we are building wonderful public schools with equally wonderful equipment. Today we are replacing the many small colleges with a few great centralized state normal schools and state universities. We are spending millions upon them in laboratories, equipment and maintenance. Today we scour the earth for specialists to sit in the chairs and speak the last word in every department of human research.
O, how the students of the "dark ages" would have rejoiced to see this day! Many of them never saw a germ!
But each student has the same definite effort to make in assimilation today as then. Knowing and growing demand the same personal struggle in the cushions of the "frat" house as back on the old oak-slab bench with its splintered side up.
I am anxiously awaiting the results. I am hoping that the boys and girls who come out in case-lots from these huge school plants will not be rows of lithographed cans on the shelves of life. I am hoping they will not be shorn of their individuality, but will have it stimulated and unfettered. I am anxious that they be not veneered but inspired, not denatured but discovered.
All this school machinery is only machinery. Back of it must be men--great men. I am anxious that the modern school have the modern equipment demanded to serve the present age. But I am more anxious that each student come in vital touch with great men. We get life from life, not from laboratories, and we have life more abundantly as our lives touch greater lives.
A school is vastly more than machinery, methods, microscopes and millions.
Many a small school struggling to live thinks that all it needs is endowment, when the fact is that its struggle for existence and the spirit of its teachers are its greatest endowment. And sometimes when the money endowment comes the spiritual endowment goes in fatty degeneration. Some schools seem to have been visited by calamities in the financial prosperity that has engulfed them.
Can we keep men before millions, and keep our ideals untainted by foundations? That is the question the age is asking.
You and I are very much interested in the answer.
Chapter VII
The Salvation of a "Sucker"
The Fiddle and the Tuning
HOW long it takes to learn things! I think I was thirty-four years learning one sentence, "You can't get something for nothing." I have not yet learned it. Every few days I stumble over it somewhere.
For that sentence utters one of the fundamentals of life that underlies every field of activity.
What is knowing?
One day a manufacturer took me thru his factory where he makes fiddles. Not violins--fiddles.
A violin is only a fiddle with a college education.
I have had the feeling ever since that you and I come into this world like the fiddle comes from the factory. We have a body and a neck. That is about all there is either to us or to the fiddle. We are empty. We have no strings. We have no bow--yet!
When the human fiddles are about six years old they go into the primary schools and up thru the grammar grades, and get the first string--the little E string. The trouble is so many of these human fiddles think they are an orchestra right away. They want to quit school and go fiddling thru life on this one string!
We must show these little fiddles they must go back into school and go up thru all the departments and institutions necessary to give them the full complement
I believe the most useful schools today are schools of struggle schools offering encouragement and facilities for young people to work their way thru and to act upon their own initiative.
Men Needed More Than Millions
We are trying a new educational experiment today.
The old "deestrick" school is passing, and with it the small academies and colleges, each with its handful of students around a teacher, as in the old days of the lyceum in Athens, when the pupils sat around the philosopher in the groves.
From these schools came the makers and the preservers of the nation.
Today we are building wonderful public schools with equally wonderful equipment. Today we are replacing the many small colleges with a few great centralized state normal schools and state universities. We are spending millions upon them in laboratories, equipment and maintenance. Today we scour the earth for specialists to sit in the chairs and speak the last word in every department of human research.
O, how the students of the "dark ages" would have rejoiced to see this day! Many of them never saw a germ!
But each student has the same definite effort to make in assimilation today as then. Knowing and growing demand the same personal struggle in the cushions of the "frat" house as back on the old oak-slab bench with its splintered side up.
I am anxiously awaiting the results. I am hoping that the boys and girls who come out in case-lots from these huge school plants will not be rows of lithographed cans on the shelves of life. I am hoping they will not be shorn of their individuality, but will have it stimulated and unfettered. I am anxious that they be not veneered but inspired, not denatured but discovered.
All this school machinery is only machinery. Back of it must be men--great men. I am anxious that the modern school have the modern equipment demanded to serve the present age. But I am more anxious that each student come in vital touch with great men. We get life from life, not from laboratories, and we have life more abundantly as our lives touch greater lives.
A school is vastly more than machinery, methods, microscopes and millions.
Many a small school struggling to live thinks that all it needs is endowment, when the fact is that its struggle for existence and the spirit of its teachers are its greatest endowment. And sometimes when the money endowment comes the spiritual endowment goes in fatty degeneration. Some schools seem to have been visited by calamities in the financial prosperity that has engulfed them.
Can we keep men before millions, and keep our ideals untainted by foundations? That is the question the age is asking.
You and I are very much interested in the answer.
Chapter VII
The Salvation of a "Sucker"
The Fiddle and the Tuning
HOW long it takes to learn things! I think I was thirty-four years learning one sentence, "You can't get something for nothing." I have not yet learned it. Every few days I stumble over it somewhere.
For that sentence utters one of the fundamentals of life that underlies every field of activity.
What is knowing?
One day a manufacturer took me thru his factory where he makes fiddles. Not violins--fiddles.
A violin is only a fiddle with a college education.
I have had the feeling ever since that you and I come into this world like the fiddle comes from the factory. We have a body and a neck. That is about all there is either to us or to the fiddle. We are empty. We have no strings. We have no bow--yet!
When the human fiddles are about six years old they go into the primary schools and up thru the grammar grades, and get the first string--the little E string. The trouble is so many of these human fiddles think they are an orchestra right away. They want to quit school and go fiddling thru life on this one string!
We must show these little fiddles they must go back into school and go up thru all the departments and institutions necessary to give them the full complement