No
doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands
behind him and drags the student from his course. The moral is
stentorian. Only the most energetic, the most highly fitted, and
the most favored have overcome the friction or the viscosity of
inertia, and these were compelled to waste three-fourths of their
energy in doing it.
Fit or unfit, Henry Adams stopped his own education in 1871,
and began to apply it for practical uses, like his neighbors. At
the end of twenty years, he found that he had finished, and could
sum up the result. He had no complaint to make against man or
woman. They had all treated him kindly; he had never met with
ill-will, ill-temper, or even ill-manners, or known a quarrel. He
had never seen serious dishonesty or ingratitude. He had found a
readiness in the young to respond to suggestion that seemed to
him far beyond all he had reason to expect. Considering the stock
complaints against the world, he could not understand why he had
nothing to complain of.
During these twenty years he had done as much work, in
quantity, as his neighbors wanted; more than they would ever stop
to look at, and more than his share. Merely in print, he thought
altogether ridiculous the number of volumes he counted on the
shelves of public libraries. He had no notion whether they served
a useful purpose; he had worked in the dark; but so had most of
his friends, even the artists, none of whom held any lofty
opinion of their success in raising the standards of society, or
felt profound respect for the methods or manners of their time,
at home or abroad, but all of whom had tried, in a way, to hold
the standard up.
Pages:
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471