Confidential Chats with Boys

by William Lee Howard

Let us take another case as an example of what I mean. You really have talent for wood carving and finally decide that you will take up this vocation—an admirable one. You thoroughly understand that in order to become a good wood-carver you must first learn to use the tools, to know how to take care of them. After this you must learn all about the different kinds of woods, how they are prepared and what effects the weather and climate have upon them. When you have been through all this preliminary work, there must come a study of designs and the history of your vocation or art. This is YOUR college education in preparation for good work and the success good work brings. You have been taught the use of every detail which goes to make up a good foundation for your career. You know HOW to use the tools and everything else is now up to you to make good. If your heart is in the work you will surely win out.

You will be apt to hear a lot about the cultural advantages of a college education; that it is never amiss in any calling. But right here comes a fact generally overlooked—you can receive a cultural education along any line you take up, and the better you apply yourself to your vocation, the better will your culture be.

In wood carving, for instance, there is much along the lines of art, painting and sculpture to be learned. Such progressive work may lead you to become a famous sculptor or decorator of the highest order. If you have wasted your time along the cultural lines needed for a writer or doctor, learned how to use their tools, but do not possess their mental equipment, failure is certain. The failures come from mental dissatisfaction.

Get out of your minds the idea that there are only three or four professions which bring position and respect. This is a great mistake and is the cause for many poor doctors, the hordes of unscrupulous lawyers and weak-kneed ministers.

Many of these failures would have been successful as carpenters, machinists, draughtsmen or contractors. But they all wanted to go or were pushed into holes they could not fit.

Remember the old saying, “A round peg will not fit into a square hole.”

A trained machinist, one who takes delight in his trade, can rise far higher in worldly goods and the respect of his fellow-men than ever can a half-contented doctor. It is the same with an electrician, bridge worker, house painter, any and all trades where the man has learned to use his brain-tools and keeps sharpening them on the grindstone of pleasure.

Don’t go into law or medicine unless you go into these professions for the love of the work. You may not know it, but the income of the average doctor or lawyer is not that of even the paper-hanger or bricklayer. If you are determined to be a doctor for the love of the profession and the great good you can do—and most of you will have to do it free for the needy and poor—then you will be happy and also probably poor.

In law, medicine, or the ministry, a college education is absolutely necessary, both cultural and preparatory. If a doctor, you must spend four years at the medical college, a year or two in the hospitals, then finish by visiting the clinics of Europe. By the time you are thirty years of age you are fitted to step into line with the best doctors.

And unless you can do all this—and it takes a lot of money—KEEP OUT. The days are passing when the boy can go from the high school to some cheap commercial medical college and take any kind of a stand among the educated doctors and the now enlightened communities. There is plenty of room in the world for the kind of a doctor I have first described, but absolutely no places waiting for the latter kind. These are not doctors, just medical warts, the sort of quacks we had a shot at in our last Chat.