Bringing up the Boy: A Message to Fathers and Mothers from a Boy of Yesterday Concerning the Men of To-morrowWerner, Carl Avery
Science
Bringing up the Boy: A Message to Fathers and Mothers from a Boy of Yesterday Concerning the Men of To-morrow
Werner, Carl Avery
Boys
I live close to my boy, and by so doing I find his level and see his
narrowed horizon as he sees it. When he was only six we lived together
in the woods, slept under the same blanket, fished and sailed and took
our daily swim together. Beginning at that early age we have sat by the
campfire at night and talked of the stars and the moon and the strange
noises of the wood. Nowhere can you get as close to your boy as you can
out under the sky with only Nature about you. It would be a splendid
thing if every father could devote a few weeks each year to “roughing
it” with his boy. Besides the opportunities it offers for community of
thought, it brings out a phase of the boy’s character that under other
conditions might never come to the surface. I recall one evening, as
the boy and I were lolling on the bank of a river, how he astonished
me by exclaiming: “See! What a beautiful sunset!” He had seen the sun
go down many times over the housetops of the town, but it needed the
solitude of that particular place and time to give him an appreciation
of its beauties. Unexpectedly there was disclosed to me an æsthetic
side of his nature that I had never known.
These are opportunities that open peculiarly to the father, and he
should take advantage of them.
I believe that every boy should be encouraged to acquire a college
education and that he should be made to pay for it. We hear a good
deal of talk nowadays about the lack of real advantage that the college
man has over the other fellow. Thousands of college men fail in their
struggles with the work-a-day world, and often you find a degree man
working in a subordinate capacity to a man of his own age who missed
a college education. It is a fact, too, that the honour men of our
colleges rarely distinguish themselves in their chosen professions.
But none of these things prove anything, because the personal equation
has to be reckoned in. I believe that the young man who takes his
college course and takes it seriously is better fitted for the work
of life than he would otherwise have been. The unschooled man who
succeeds would have succeeded with more ease and to a higher standard
had he been schooled. The college man who fails would have failed more
miserably had he been untrained. I believe that failure of an educated
man is in spite of his education, and not because of it.
If you want to make sure that your boy is going to use his college
education to the best advantage, let him pay his way. The failures that
our institutions of learning turn out are not the men who work their
way through; they are the sons of the affluent, the little brothers
of the rich. The boy who drives the hay-rake or works behind the
counter of his father’s store in vacation time is rarely found among
the derelicts. Let the boy share the cost with you, and you need have
no fear that either the time or money spent for education will go for
naught.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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