ON GOING TO COLLEGE.
One of the professors of Harvard University once said, in a lecture, that many young men made a great mistake in going to college; that a university was for students, and for students only; and that if a boy were not of a studious turn of mind it was more than likely that he would waste his time for four years that could be put to better advantage in some mercantile business.
The time for such ideas has gone into history with other ideas of a similar nature, such as the buying and selling of slaves, and the pride noblemen used to feel in not being able to read or write. A college education is quite different from acquiring knowledge at a college. For instance, you may be attending a preparatory school at this moment, and are considering what courses of study you will pursue in order to obtain a "college education." What do you find at Harvard? There are some two hundred different courses to choose from, and by choosing sixteen or seventeen, and taking four or four and a half a year, at the end of four years you will, if the examinations are passed satisfactorily, obtain a degree of A. B., which in the common phrase signifies that you have obtained an education. And yet you have studied only sixteen or seventeen out of the two hundred preliminary courses that lead up to a real education. In fact, when these four years are done you have only just begun! And therefore the actual study covered amounts to little.
What has been accomplished, however, is the study and practice of how to learn, and how to go to work to get an education. You have learned how to start on any subject, whether it be the selling and buying of leather and tin goods, or the teaching of boys' schools, or the science of biology. Little information has been acquired, but you have at least learned how to attack any subject.
Furthermore, you have come from your home, wherever that may be, have met other fellows, have joined them in studies, in sports, in clubs, and in societies; and under the guidance of a carefully selected body of instructors and authorities you have learned how to take care of yourself in emergencies of all kinds, how to read, how and what to study, how to treat men and women—even how to fight when that becomes necessary; and whether you decide to take up further study or mercantile business, the result is the same. You know men, and the ways of dealing with them; you know books, and the ways of dealing with them. And incidentally you have acquired a great respect for both these valuable companions.
Let no young boy say to himself that, being dull in school, he will waste time in college. Time is never wasted that is spent in manly existence, in seeing and working with other men on a high plane, in reading any good books upon good themes or good ideas. If you have little money for any such purpose, remember that any sincere man can either win scholarships or work his way through college by doing janitor-work or a thousand other things. Remember, too, that not only have some of the greatest men America has ever known worked their way through college, but that money does not count for so much at the university as it does anywhere else in life. Many a poor fellow has led his class, and not in studies alone, but in sports and in societies and in respect. But—and this is a big "but"—he must be a man, a gentleman, and a hard worker.
If you are going into mercantile business, if you are going into professional work, or if you are going to do anything that comes first to hand, you will be the better for the three or four years, and no one who can study nights, while he works days, can be prevented from passing the entrance examinations in time. The only person who can really prevent him is himself, for if he has not the force of character to stick to it till the end, he can never do much of anything, to say nothing of entering or working his way through college.
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