Repository: UIHistories Project: Course Catalog - 1877-1878 Version B [PAGE 69]

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Miscellany.

67

of business, in agriculture and mechanic arts, as well as in law, medicine or trade. In the long run, then, ignorance costs more than education. Nearly all of you can, if you will, get a fair common education. One-fourth of you can get a high school education. One, at least, in ten has the talent to take a liberal College education. Nothing hinders in most cases but your own want of will. More than one-half the college students of this country are from the middle classes in society or lower. A large proportion of these students pay their own way. Take the first step, and the second becomes easier, and so on to the end. Where there is an earnest Will, there is sure to open a feasible Way. The lamentation, "too late," has killed or chilled many a good thought. "It is never too late to learn." Preparation for College ought to begin at 14 or 15 years of age, but many of our best men commenced their preparatory studies at 20 or 25 even, and not a few have taken the College course at 30, 35, and sometimes at 40 years of age. Do not linger too long over the common branches, as they are called, in the vain hope of making them perfect before taking any higher studies. As soon as you have gone through the com-' mon practical Arithmetic with a tolerable understanding of it, take up Algebra or Geometry. After completing a single book in Geography, proceed at once to Natural Philosophy or Physiology, without waiting for the higher Geography. As soon as the first Grammar is fairly finished take up Rhetoric and Composition, or if you can find a teacher, Latin or French. There is enormous waste of time in going over and over again, the same studies, with new text-books, in the foolish expectation of attaining a perfect understanding of them. What you want is not more study of the old, but more mind, new knowledge to feed mind, broader intelligence, larger views. You may then return some day to your old studies and make more progress in a month than you made before in a year. Thousands of students are robbed of a liberal education by this common blunder. Finally, wait for no teacher or school term. All study must be done by yourself. All learning is the act of your own mind. Teachers and schools are helps, but he who has the courage to study alone may do without them. If half the students were in College who ought to be there, for their own sakes, and for public weal, every College in the State would be crowded to its utmost. And the State, feeling the influx of this large measure of educated brain, would march with a giant's pace to larger wealth, higher social and political power and to a more splendid and fruitful civilization.