The age of machinery has peopled this continent with promoters and
millionaires, and the work of a thousand years has been done in a
century. The thing has, however, been accomplished at some cost. An
ignorant man makes a fortune and demands the higher education for his
children. But it is too late: he should have given it to them when he
was in his shirt sleeves. All that they are able to receive now is
something very different from education. In receiving it they drag down
the old standards. School and college are filled with illiterates. The
whole land must patiently wait till Learning has warmed back to life
her chilled and starved descendants. Perhaps the child or grandchild of
the fortune-builder will teach the children on his knee what he himself
learned too late in life to stead him much.
Hunger and thirst for learning is a passion that comes, as it were,
out of the ground; now in an age of wealth, now in an age of poverty.
Young men are born whom nothing will satisfy except the arts and the
sciences. They seek out some scholar at a university and aim at him
from boyhood. They persuade their parents to send them to college.
They are bored and fatigued by everything that life offers except this
thing. Now, society does not create this hunger. All that society can
do is to provide nourishment of the right kind, good instruction, true
learning, the best scholarship which history has left behind. I believe
that to-day there is a spirit of learning abroad in America--here and
there, in the young--the old insatiable passion. I feel as if men
were arising--most of them still handicapped by the lack of early
training--to whom life has no meaning except as a search for truth.
This exalted famine of the young scholar is the hope of the world.
It is religion and art and science in the chrysalis. The thing which
society must beware of doing is of interposing between the young
learner and his natural food some mechanical product or patent food
of its own. Good culture means the whole of culture in its original
sources; bad culture is any substitute for this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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