Lessons in Life; A Series of Familiar EssaysHolland, J. G. (Josiah Gilbert)
Philosophy
Lessons in Life; A Series of Familiar Essays
Holland, J. G. (Josiah Gilbert)
Conduct of life
There must be something radically wrong in our educational system,
when youth are generally unfitted for the station which they are
to occupy, or are forced into professions for which they have no
natural fitness. The truth is that the stuff talked to boys and
girls alike, about "aiming high," and the assurances given them,
indiscriminately, that they can be any thing that they choose to
become, are essential nuisances. Our children all go to the public
schools. They are all taught these things. They all go out into
the world with high notions, and find it impossible to content
themselves with their lot. They had hoped to realize in life that
which had been promised them in school, but all their dreams have
faded, and left them disappointed and unhappy. They envy those
whom they have been taught to consider above them, and learn to
count their own lives a failure. Girls starve in a mean poverty,
or do worse, because they are too proud to work in a chamber, or
go into a shop. American servants are obsolete, all common
employments are at a discount, the professions are crowded to
overflowing, the country throngs with demagogues, and a general
discontent with a humble lot prevails, simply because the youth of
America have had the idea drilled into them that to be in private
life, in whatever condition, is to be, in some sense, a "nobody."
It is possible that the schools are not exclusively to blame for
this state of things, and that our political harangues, and even
our political institutions, have something to do with it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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