The trouble with most youths is that they do not pay enough attention to straightening their tracks and reducing grades. They try to speed on crooked, ill-made roads and dangerous grades, with light rails, poor equipment, and the result is thousands of wrecks.
Every man should lay out a clean, straight, level track to his goal. All obstructions should be removed, all dangers and risks reduced to a minimum, making his road straight, firm, solid, and safe.
When great railroads make test trials in competing for the transcontinental mails, they not only see that the tracks, the cars, and the engines are in perfect condition; they even pick out the finest pieces of coal, those containing the greatest possible amount of energy, and which leave the smallest amount of clinkers or ashes. The utmost care is exercised in lubricating bearings. Tracks are kept clear, and everything possible is done to secure speed and safety.
Yet everywhere we see people making their great life race in poor, broken-down cars, on crooked tracks, light, loose rails, over heavy grades. They are always losing time by reason of hot boxes and accidents of all kinds, yet they wonder why they can not compete with those who are better equipped. They took little or no precaution to insure success when they started out on their trip; little regard was paid to the condition of their roads or cars, to the fuel as to its energy and bulk, or to any of the essential things on which success depends. Yet they wonder why they do not win in the race.
Education is power. No matter how small your salary may be, every bit of valuable information you pick up, every bit of good reading or thinking you do, in fact everything you do to make yourself a larger and completer man or woman, will also help you to advance. I have known boys who were working very hard for very little money to do more for their advancement in their spare time, their half-holidays, by improving their minds, than by the actual work they did. Their salaries were insignificant in comparison with their growth of mind.
I know a young man who jumped in one bound from a salary of five thousand to ten thousand dollars, largely because of his insatiable effort at self-improvement. His great passion seemed to be to make the largest and completest man possible. This young man is a good example of the possibility of reputation to help one on in the world. Everybody who knew him, knew that he was determined to make something of himself. It did not make any difference if his fellow employees wanted to throw their time away, he didn’t. They soon found that it was of no use to try to tease him away from his reading or studying, for he had set his mind toward the future. He had no idea of being a little, small, picayune man. He had a passion for enlargement, for growth. Those who worked with him were very much surprised at his rapid advancement; but there was a good reason for every bit of it. While they were spending their evenings and money trying to have a good time, he was trying to educate himself by a rigid course of self-improvement.
Everywhere we see young men and young women tied to very ordinary positions all their lives simply because, though they had good brains, they were never cultivated, never developed. They have never tried to improve themselves by reading good literature. Their salaries on a Saturday night, and a good time, are about all they see; and the result is the narrow, the contracted, the pinched career. Men and women who have utilized only a very small percentage of their ability,—not made it available by discipline and education,—always work at a great disadvantage. A man capable, by nature, of being an employer, is often compelled to be a very ordinary employee because his mind is totally untrained.
One of the greatest questions that confronts this age is that of adult education. The commercial prizes and the opportunities are so great in this country that the youth early catch the money-making contagion, and they are impatient to get jobs and to get a start in life.
Many of them can not see the use of so many years of drudgery in school and college. And their judgment is not sufficiently developed. They have neither had the experience, nor have they the judgment to realize the infinite value of a well-stored mind.
They are not old enough to realize the tremendous handicap of ignorance in their later careers when they come to wrestle with men who have had a superb mental training.
The result is, that, unless the youths are fortunate enough to have parents who appreciate the situation, and who can hold them to their task until they are fitted to enter the battle of the strong, or, unless they have advisors who can control them, they quit school and start out in life half prepared, only to see their terrible mistake when they get right into the fight with commercial giants who are superbly trained.
Later they see their mistake, and continue to regret it, without making any special effort to compensate for their loss.
Unfortunately most adults have the impression that if they have once passed the youthful, impressionable period, they can never make up for it, can never get an education, can never compensate for their loss.
Now, there certainly will be devised a perfectly practical educational system by which adults can, even while carrying on their vocations, get a very fair equivalent for a good education, even a college course.
The misconception rests largely upon the fact that it is not so easy to commit to memory later in life, hence not s‘o easy to learn the rudimentary rules of grammar, of mathematics, and other elementary branches.
On the other hand, most of the other faculties are just as susceptible, and some of them very much stronger, in a much better condition to take advantage of an education.
The young person does not realize what an education will really mean to him. His judgment is not mature. He has not had the experience, while the adult realizes his loss and is more eager to make up for it. He can work harder, is generally willing to make sacrifices if he is only sure that he can still compensate for his loss.
He will know better what will be of great value and what of little value to him. He will be very much more practical in gaining his knowledge. He will be more eager to learn, especially after he gets far enough to see the great advantage of what he is getting.
There never was a time in the world’s history when leaders in adult education were so much needed as to-day. There are millions of people waiting for it, eager for it, hungry for it; but they do not know how to begin.
The inventor of a fair substitute for a liberal education for the adult,—an education that will be practical and comparatively easy to obtain, especially one that can be obtained in spare time, in odd minutes, in long winter evenings, without being too hard or too exacting, or too disagreeable, will render a greater service to the world than has almost any inventor.
Most adults, even when they realize their great loss of an early education, and are eager to compensate for it, do not know how, to go to work to do it.
They do not realize how much of this can be done by systematic reading, even a little at a time.
Most of these people are incapable of self-direction or systematic study. They need leaders who will direct them and encourage them, and hold them to their task until they have acquired the absorption habit, the reading habit, the study habit, the thinking habit.
I am constantly coming in contact with people who tell me that it is the regret of their lives that they left school so early, or that they did not go to college, but who say that the time has gone by now, that it is too late to make up for their loss and they must do the best they can.
Getting an education is like getting a fortune. Most people do not think that little savings amount to much. They spend all their loose change because saving it would not amount to much towards making up a fortune. And so they keep spending and do not get the fortune.
Multitudes of adults who feel the need of making up for their early educational losses, do not think that a few minutes of reading during their spare time, or a little