2023-09-29_What_the_Young_Man_Should_Know
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00:00:30.560 | Glancing out the window, I can see the subject, and eventual victim of this inquiry,
00:00:37.680 | dangerously perched in the crotch of an old chestnut tree about 15 feet above the ground.
00:00:43.440 | Should I rush out and tell him to get down? Or should I let him be, hoping that he won't
00:00:48.240 | climb any higher? Or, if he does climb any higher, hoping that he will not fall?
00:00:53.760 | It is probably alright, so I shall not bother him. Tree climbing is one of the things he has
00:00:59.040 | learned all by himself. There aren't many things he will have the fun of learning all by himself.
00:01:04.320 | Most of the things he is going to learn will be hammered into him. Latin and history and grammar
00:01:09.920 | and mathematics up to the binomial theorem. I'm not worried about his progress up the ladder from
00:01:14.800 | high school or boarding school to college and from college to law school or medical school.
00:01:19.360 | It seems incredible that the young biped, now perched in the chestnut tree, will someday,
00:01:23.920 | without stupendous effort on my part or on his, eventually graduate from college or
00:01:29.680 | even become a PhD. But he will, almost certainly. The strictly educational side of his life,
00:01:36.880 | once he gets his hands firmly on the lowest rung of that ancient ladder, will take care of itself.
00:01:41.600 | What concerns me is something entirely different, a good deal more like tree climbing.
00:01:49.280 | I have never heard of a school or college that gave a course in tree climbing,
00:01:53.760 | and human life is full of useful accomplishments and rewarding experiences like tree climbing,
00:02:00.320 | like making a speech for example, or being able to take care of oneself on a camping trip,
00:02:05.920 | abilities that seem to me at least as valuable as a knowledge of conjugations and the dates of
00:02:11.200 | battles, perhaps if one is to become a self-sufficient well-rounded human being,
00:02:17.120 | much more valuable. What are those abilities, skills, or accomplishments, those
00:02:24.720 | extracurricular proficiencies that every man should have in order to be
00:02:28.320 | rounded and self-sufficient, and when can he acquire them, and how?
00:02:33.360 | Let me return, without looking at him, for he is probably by now 30 feet above the ground,
00:02:40.400 | to the 7-year-old imp in the chestnut tree. Impartially adding up to myself his skills,
00:02:46.560 | other than tree climbing, I find that he cannot count money or give change, that he is unable to
00:02:53.520 | tie his own shoelaces, that he would most certainly starve if left alone in a well-stocked kitchen,
00:03:00.240 | but on the other hand, that he can perform a rather startling back somersault off a diving board,
00:03:07.600 | that he speaks and understands elementary German, and can sit down at the piano and play with only
00:03:13.680 | a few mistakes, a Mozart minuet. Clearly, to this handful of skills and accomplishments,
00:03:20.320 | he must add others, many others, before he is even on the road to becoming a self-sufficient and
00:03:27.360 | well-rounded young man. Leaving all formal subjects out of consideration, he should learn
00:03:33.840 | how to swim, handle firearms, speak in public, cook, typewrite, ride a horse, drive a car,
00:03:41.120 | dance, drink, and speak at least one foreign language well. The list does not end there.
00:03:47.920 | There are several dozen mental and physical skills that I should like him to acquire.
00:03:52.000 | He will acquire some of them in the mere course of growing up. He will acquire some of them more
00:03:59.040 | painfully as the result of adult pressure. There are others that he will avoid, and he will
00:04:04.400 | eventually be punished for their omission with not a little discomfort and social misery.
00:04:10.800 | Ordinary education, even high-priced education, will not guarantee him the essential skills,
00:04:17.760 | and some of them are better learned after "education is over." It is up to me to set
00:04:24.320 | about making a list of those skills. It is up to me to see to it that he gets them,
00:04:30.800 | because they are skills of hand, eye, ear, or brain, which will enlarge, deepen, and ripen him
00:04:38.720 | as a human being. But how, you may ask, can a young man be enlarged by learning to handle
00:04:45.040 | firearms? In what conceivable way will he be ripened by knowing how to cook or drink? Patience.
00:04:52.720 | In asking what these things are that every civilized, intelligent, educated young man
00:04:58.480 | should know, remember that I am thinking of skills, not contents. Of outside interests and
00:05:06.720 | non-scholastic activities, rather than of the stream of Latin, Greek, physics, social science,
00:05:12.160 | Jacobean poetry, and elementary beekeeping, which, from kindergarten to senior year, will moisten,
00:05:19.360 | but not clog, the sieve that is his mind. And so, let me hasten to turn away from the mountain
00:05:25.920 | range of modern education, which threatens to cast its shadow over this discussion.
00:05:30.400 | Let me mention once, and then not mention again, the project method, John Dewey,
00:05:34.480 | intelligence quotients, and the Dalton plan. The average high school or boarding school is not
00:05:40.080 | modern and will give your son and mine little beside formal education, and even more formal
00:05:46.480 | sport. One will get him into college, and the other may leave him with a peculiarly atrocious
00:05:52.640 | form of hick-athletic patriotism. If we parents do not supplement what is given by the usual schools,
00:05:59.520 | our sons will come out of them mere Christian stockbrokers with an abnormal craving for bodily
00:06:05.600 | exercise. If we want our sons to be able to drive a car, speak French fluently, play the piano,
00:06:11.040 | set a broken leg, and make horses do their bidding, we shall have to look outside of these
00:06:15.840 | schools and colleges. And I submit that he who cannot do these things is not completely educated.
00:06:23.520 | The list of skills, as distinct from book learning, does not include mere parlor tricks,
00:06:29.280 | such as playing the ukulele, fortune-telling, a startling acquaintance with the insides of
00:06:35.040 | the Encyclopedia Britannica, or other accomplishments whereby the fierce psychology
00:06:40.320 | advertisements promise to make their victims the life of the party, or a successful salesman in
00:06:46.320 | ten lessons. And the list does not include the special aptitudes necessary to a man in
00:06:51.920 | this profession, or the accomplishments which aim at the development of his character.
00:06:56.560 | The skills I have in mind may fortify character, but chiefly as a by-product. They will make life
00:07:03.280 | richer and therefore happier, though happiness itself is usually a by-product. They are tools
00:07:10.560 | which will help a man to mine his own vein of gold and some of the gold in the world about him.
00:07:17.040 | Some of them will save him discomfort, some of them will bring satisfaction and pleasure,
00:07:23.040 | some of them will help him avoid danger and give him the joy of mastery over animal fears.
00:07:29.280 | Some are elementary and taken for granted, others are rarer accomplishments not always striven for.
00:07:37.520 | It seems obvious that our young man should know how to swim. More specifically,
00:07:43.520 | he should know how to swim at least a mile, dive creditably, and not feel panicky underwater.
00:07:50.080 | No parents will disagree on this point, since anyone who does not know how to swim stands in
00:07:55.680 | some danger of being drowned. Swimming is valuable not only to preserve life, but because the fear of
00:08:01.760 | water is instinctive, and the most civilized man is the one who has conquered all that makes him
00:08:08.320 | afraid and that can be conquered. Not only should our young man be able to dive courageously and
00:08:15.760 | neatly, but he should be able also to revive those less skillful than himself by rolling them on a
00:08:22.960 | barrel and pumping their helpless arms, though I do not insist that every young man should be
00:08:28.080 | a lifeguard. If he learns all the other accomplishments expected of him, he will have
00:08:32.480 | little time left for that. He should be able to drive an automobile well. By well, I mean far
00:08:40.000 | better than most people do now. Of all our conveniences, the automobile is the most docile
00:08:46.080 | and the most dangerous. It seems to encourage a perilous discourtesy. People who always answer
00:08:54.480 | letters, smile when spoken to, and rise when ladies enter the room think nothing of hogging
00:08:59.200 | the road or passing on a curve. Our young man should drive safely or not at all, and he should
00:09:06.320 | not be altogether helpless when a car breaks down. He must know how to change a tire and offer some
00:09:11.920 | sort of diagnosis when the engine sputters and dies. My list does not include a knowledge of
00:09:18.640 | how to pilot a plane. Good pilots are born, not made. A man should stay on the ground unless
00:09:25.600 | peculiarly fitted for the air. He may be as air-minded as you please, but unless he is air-bodied
00:09:32.320 | and air-reflexed, this modern skill should be left severely alone. He ought to know how to clean,
00:09:39.120 | load, and shoot a revolver or a rifle. Someday he may have to in self-defense. And shooting at a
00:09:45.920 | target is also good fun and an excellent discipline for hand and eye. I should like my son to be able
00:09:51.760 | to hit a silver dollar at fifty yards, and I should insist that he be able to manage a gun so
00:09:58.080 | as to injure no one but the target. He must not be the kind of duffer who makes bystanders nervous.
00:10:04.160 | I do not advance shooting as valuable for reasons of citizenship or military training. I prefer that
00:10:11.840 | what he shoots at be inanimate. He may develop a passion for shooting duck, grouse, and deer,
00:10:17.600 | without my blessing, for it seems to me that the longing to assassinate wild animals is a
00:10:22.800 | barbarous and childish method of asserting the superiority of the human race and
00:10:27.280 | considerably less civilized than dueling. As for self-defense, a man should certainly be
00:10:33.840 | able to take care of himself in a scrap. He need not learn jujitsu. Old-fashioned boxing will be
00:10:39.440 | enough. He will get some of this in school. He should get enough of it so that he can give and
00:10:45.040 | take a good smack on the jaw, whether in friendship or anger. No matter how short the list of his
00:10:51.120 | accomplishments, this should be one of them. The Soviet Russians, who have seldom hesitated to use
00:10:58.880 | firearms against those whom doctrine forces them to consider enemies, hold boxing to be brutal and
00:11:06.240 | forbid it to their young men. Let us register our disagreement and pass on. He should learn how to
00:11:13.200 | take care of himself in other ways. He ought to know the rudiments of camping, how to build a fire,
00:11:18.320 | how to chop wood, how to take a cinder out of his eye, how to deal with a severed artery,
00:11:23.920 | how to doctor himself for ordinary ailments. He should also be able to take care of other people
00:11:29.440 | in emergencies, to apply first aid, set a broken bone, revive a drunk or a victim of gas, deal with
00:11:35.840 | a fainting fit, administer the right emetic or antidote for a case of poisoning. And he should
00:11:41.760 | be able to feed himself, to cook, not only because someday he may need to, but because cooking is one
00:11:47.840 | of the fine arts and a source of infinite pleasure. He should be able to scramble eggs, brew coffee,
00:11:53.360 | broil a steak, dress a salad, carve a chicken, and produce on occasion one first-class dish,
00:11:59.040 | such as onion soup. The more he can do in these days of the delicatessen store and the kitchenette,
00:12:05.280 | the better. It is not effeminate, it is not beyond him, and the best chefs are all men.
00:12:11.600 | Our hands, originally the keys used by man's brain to unlock the whole wide world, are in this age
00:12:18.880 | of patent appliances in some danger of withering through disuse. A man may go through life without
00:12:26.080 | using his hands for anything more difficult than gripping a golf club, signing letters,
00:12:30.720 | fumbling for coins, lighting a cigarette, opening a bottle, and holding a telephone receiver.
00:12:35.280 | When the furnace goes out or the radio goes dumb or a door won't close or a pipe leaks,
00:12:39.520 | he has to send for an expensive expert. Therefore, our young man should learn to be handy in repairing
00:12:45.520 | the trifling faults of his home. Of course, he may live all his life in apartment houses and be
00:12:51.440 | spared such attention to trifling faults, but if he must live in apartment houses, I had rather him
00:12:57.520 | do so from choice than from incompetence. He should know how to use paintbrushes, a saw, a hammer,
00:13:04.560 | and other common tools. It is much more fun than he might think. It adds to his self-respect,
00:13:10.480 | it satisfies the throttled manual ape, and it supplies one of his few contacts with the remote
00:13:16.800 | world of physical labor. One of the best tools he can use is practically unknown among those who
00:13:23.360 | have not spent some time in a newspaper office—the typewriter. Our young man should also have a
00:13:28.960 | beautiful and distinguished handwriting. He will not learn this in any school. Schools are as likely
00:13:35.440 | as not to ruin whatever handwriting he might have had. But handwriting should be reserved for special
00:13:41.280 | occasions. The bulk of his writing, particularly if he is a professional man who has much of it to do,
00:13:46.880 | should be done on a typewriter. I do not mean poking at the machine with two fingers, but
00:13:51.680 | full-fledged touch system capable of turning out 3,000 words an hour. This talent will be
00:13:57.840 | enormously useful. Spread widely enough, it might even revive the lost art of letter writing and
00:14:03.520 | undo some of the harm, the laziness, the mental as well as verbal sloppiness induced by the appalling
00:14:09.280 | habit of dictating to a stenographer. He should play one outdoor game well, and have a workable
00:14:17.040 | smattering of several more. To my eye, an American who cannot throw and catch a ball seems pathetic
00:14:24.000 | and grotesque. Perhaps I am prejudiced, and baseball, except for boys and a small band
00:14:29.920 | of professionals, is a lost cause. The usual American game is golf. So let him learn,
00:14:35.680 | for the sake of human contact and outdoor recreation, to go around the course in at most 110.
00:14:41.840 | If it were a question of my own son, I should try to steer him toward tennis—a livelier game and
00:14:48.720 | prettier to watch, and one with more possibilities of mental release than golf, which often undoes in
00:14:56.080 | discouragement, obsession, and emotional strain the good it does as exercise. A game should not
00:15:02.400 | be an end in itself, as is often true of golf, but a relaxation and a complete contrast to the
00:15:10.640 | sedentary. There is something a little sedentary about golf. The bicycle is gone, yet every boy
00:15:17.520 | should know how to ride one. Don't ask me why. He should also be able to skate, sail a boat,
00:15:22.960 | and handle a canoe passably. Fishing is a specialty like chess. Those who have it in them
00:15:29.040 | will eventually find themselves doing it. Those who do not feel the call need not bother.
00:15:34.960 | It is a singular commentary on college athletics to realize how few sports a man can get along with
00:15:40.960 | quite happily after graduation. How quickly the vast array of football, soccer, pole vaulting,
00:15:47.520 | basketball, water polo, lacrosse, hurdling, handball, rowing, wrestling, fencing shrinks
00:15:53.200 | in after life to golf or tennis, or surprisingly often to occasional sweat in a steam cabinet.
00:16:01.280 | Walking is a noble but neglected sport. Americans hike once in a long while, but seldom walk.
00:16:09.920 | And biking easily becomes hitchhiking. The automobile, organized athletics,
00:16:15.680 | and the fact that American cities and American suburbs are dismal places to walk in,
00:16:21.120 | have caused American feet to abandon the roads. For every climber in an American national park,
00:16:28.080 | some of which are quite as beautiful as any Alps, there are 10 hikers, 50 who pack on horses,
00:16:35.440 | and 10,000 who survey the wonders of nature from the windows of a sedan.
00:16:40.160 | Walking in this country is a lost cause, yet walking is one of the habits I should wish my
00:16:46.160 | son to acquire. No other exercise, if indulged in several days at a time in pleasant, moderately
00:16:52.720 | wild country, has greater power to remake a man, to iron out his creases, to produce deep health
00:17:00.080 | and spiritual calm. The first steps in this elementary course had best be taken in Europe,
00:17:06.160 | where the natives do not look upon people with heavy shoes and knapsacks as slightly cracked.
00:17:11.120 | Everyone should know a great deal about animals. It is natural for boys to collect stray dogs,
00:17:17.360 | and all children seem instinctively to be much more interested in every other branch of the
00:17:22.960 | animal kingdom than their own. It is equally natural for the city and suburban boy to grow
00:17:29.040 | up with no more contact with animals than Mickey Mouse and an occasional trip to the zoo.
00:17:34.160 | Kindness to animals and an understanding of them has become in modern life a skill that must be
00:17:40.080 | nourished and artificially trained. I do not expect my son to become a Raymond Dittmars or
00:17:47.280 | a William Beebe, but I shall think him lacking unless he has much to do with animals and gets
00:17:52.640 | on well with them. Civilization has hustled us all horribly fast and horribly far away from our
00:17:59.280 | primitive state, from the time, biologically not very long ago, when man's life depended a great
00:18:05.520 | deal on animals. A certain return to nature is healthy and desirable. The best animal for the
00:18:13.040 | purpose of this return to nature is the horse. I insist, then, that a boy should have many horses
00:18:18.400 | in his life and should learn how to stay in a saddle with pleasure to himself and a minimum
00:18:23.040 | of annoyance to his mount. Riding is one of the required studies in my curriculum,
00:18:28.320 | valuable both as one of the possible victories over physical timidity and as a source of pleasure.
00:18:34.240 | With riding should go some knowledge of how to take care of a horse, but I should not like my
00:18:40.000 | son to become horsey. Horsey people are victims of an obsession even worse than golf. They lead
00:18:47.200 | mentally four-footed lives and the spiritual aroma of the noblest of beasts clings to them as the
00:18:54.560 | smell of straw and manure clings to the stables. It is a clean, time-honored smell, but a bit too
00:19:02.240 | pervasive. I have three fears for the future of my son, that he will join the army, enter the church,
00:19:09.520 | or become horsey. Trivial but important because one can be so uncomfortable if one does not know
00:19:17.920 | them are the parlor amenities. A boy should learn how to dance. Good dancers, like aviators,
00:19:24.640 | are born. But anyone can learn to do modern, real estate dancing, that form of rhythmically
00:19:31.600 | bumping into other people in a small space with a technique dictated by the high land value of
00:19:36.480 | the places where dancing is usually to be found. The kind of dancing that is really fun is extinct
00:19:42.480 | in America. Social dancing is no great art, but essential if one wishes between the ages of 16 and
00:19:49.360 | 22 to become acquainted with more than a few specimens of the opposite sex. As to card games,
00:19:55.840 | I play bridge so badly myself that I am prejudiced against it. If one plays bridge well enough to
00:20:02.160 | enjoy it, one probably plays too much of it to the exclusion of better things. As a refuge from
00:20:08.240 | boring conversation, it is without equal. Backgammon, though useful for the same purpose,
00:20:15.040 | is a monotonous blind alley. Pool and billiards are specialties. From these indoor pastimes,
00:20:22.880 | our student can pick one optional elementary course, which will be given at the pleasure
00:20:27.600 | of the instructor. Even more trivial, but infuriating if one is clumsy at it,
00:20:33.760 | tipping. It would be very pleasant to go through life with a knowledge of how to tip
00:20:39.600 | naturally, justly, without fear and without reproach. American social habits being what
00:20:46.400 | they are, there is one indoor skill which seems to me not only far more important than bridge or
00:20:51.920 | dancing, but actually compulsory. Drinking. A young man who could convince me that his lips
00:20:58.480 | really would never touch liquor might be let off my required course in drinking, but he would be an
00:21:04.560 | exceedingly rare bird, and alcohol is so much more evident a liquid in the United States than water
00:21:10.880 | that it is probably quite as necessary for a young man to learn how to drink as it is for him to
00:21:16.080 | learn how to swim. If the youth of the country had been taught how to drink, just as they were
00:21:21.520 | taught not to eat between meals or swallow before they had chewed, we should never have had
00:21:26.320 | prohibition. It is a more difficult art than most, for every man reacts differently, and every man
00:21:33.040 | should know long before the time when, according to our customs, he indulges in his first collegiate
00:21:40.560 | binge, whether liquor goes to his head, his legs, or his morals, whether he is the type that sings,
00:21:48.080 | fights, weeps, climbs lamp posts, or pinches the girls. Furthermore, he should learn his capacity
00:21:55.520 | and stick within its limits. He should know something about the different kinds of drink,
00:21:59.680 | and which drinks produce chaos within him when mixed. By all means, let him leave drink alone
00:22:05.600 | if he wants to, but since nine times out of ten he will drink, let him do so sensibly.
00:22:12.800 | I have omitted from this list all mention of women, not so much because it is a subject of
00:22:18.320 | appalling breadth, leading to endless discussions of chastity, frustration, fulfillment, birth
00:22:24.640 | control, curiosity, mate hunger, and other less printable but even more important topics, because
00:22:30.400 | in regard to the other sex, the fairly well-educated seem to be at as great a disadvantage
00:22:35.680 | as the rest of mankind. What every high school, boarding school, and college graduate should know
00:22:40.880 | is no different from what every man should learn in this darkest and most unteachable province of
00:22:46.000 | human conduct. I shall not be the one to tell students of this course what acquired skills can
00:22:51.600 | prevent mistakes and heartache. Where sex is concerned, nature clearly intended us to make
00:22:56.880 | many mistakes in her hope that some of them would be productive. I shall certainly be in a minority
00:23:04.880 | in suggesting that our sons should know the rudiments of gambling. Gambling might be placed
00:23:11.360 | on the same plane as drink. The less use one has for it, the better. And the sooner America gives
00:23:17.680 | up gambling, not only at card tables, roulette wheels, and slot machines, but in stocks and bonds
00:23:23.920 | of equally mysterious and unpredictable corporations, the better also. But gambling in
00:23:29.920 | one form or another seems to be a national habit of mind. Almost every American gambles at some
00:23:36.400 | time in his life, and there are things valuable in other departments of life which gambling can teach.
00:23:42.000 | To be a good sport, to be a good winner as well as a good loser, especially when games are played
00:23:47.920 | for money. Not to brood over the irrevocable, not to give way to retroactive daydreams and say,
00:23:56.000 | "If only I had put a big stack on double zero. If only I had sold out in August 1929."
00:24:02.480 | October of that year was the rout of the amateur gambler, and the crash revealed this country to be
00:24:09.840 | singularly full of poor losers. Important as it is to be a good loser in public, it is even more
00:24:16.960 | important to learn not to try to turn the hands of the clock backward in the privacy of one's own
00:24:21.600 | soul. Higher than almost any other accomplishment on the list do I place music. There is no reason
00:24:28.880 | why any boy who is not absolutely tone deaf should not learn how to play one musical instrument well
00:24:34.240 | enough for it to be a self-resource and a tolerable pleasure to others. If it were not for
00:24:40.240 | the certainty that our educators would make it as deadly during school and as shunned in afterlife
00:24:46.080 | as that badly embalmed language, I should advocate the substitution of music for Latin as a required
00:24:52.480 | subject. Music is or ought to be an essential part of every civilized human being's life.
00:24:58.080 | Economic necessity, the radio, and the phonograph have put the playing of music beyond most
00:25:04.480 | Americans. Our children should bring this back. My choice would be the piano. The violin is far
00:25:10.960 | more painful in incompetent hands, and most other instruments are not meant to be heard singly.
00:25:17.200 | The saxophone and the ukulele should be placed on par with the taking of drugs.
00:25:21.200 | There is much to be said for being able to sing parts decently, and any amateur who knows the
00:25:27.120 | words of even the commonest songs is a phenomenon. I realize that even this is asking a great deal.
00:25:33.840 | Perhaps I expect too much. My students will receive a passing grade if they can sit
00:25:38.720 | and listen to good music intelligently and, moderately often, without pressure.
00:25:43.360 | A civilized man should know how to read. The ability to read, or rather the habit of reading,
00:25:50.720 | is very rare even among intelligent people and has to be taught and kept up if it is not to
00:25:56.000 | become rusty. The educators tumble over one another with new methods of teaching children
00:26:01.280 | how to make sense out of print, but not a single pedagogue, so far as I know, has successfully
00:26:07.200 | tackled the problem of how to keep people reading books once they have learned that it can be done.
00:26:12.400 | Incidentally, if someone were to write a little book called "How to Read the Newspapers,"
00:26:17.440 | he would earn the undying gratitude of those who search hurriedly for the sports,
00:26:21.840 | the market, the obituaries, glance at the headlines, and then throw all the newspaper
00:26:25.840 | on the floor. If the young man over whose head hangs this list of accomplishments could not find
00:26:31.840 | time because of the necessity of healing for the news or keeping dates with co-eds, for more than
00:26:37.920 | a few of these skills, let a fluent reading and speaking knowledge of at least one foreign
00:26:42.880 | language be among them—French or German, preferably both. A parent must expect no help
00:26:48.560 | from schools in the teaching of foreign languages, or rather, such is the impression of the student
00:26:53.760 | who goes to the average school, in the teaching of irregular verbs. Governesses and tutors,
00:27:00.320 | little trips abroad in adolescent summers, can start a false spring which withers and dies as
00:27:06.480 | soon as the child goes to a regular school. Everyone learns one language as he learns to walk.
00:27:11.840 | The learning of more ought not to be so hopeless, but hopeless it is for Americans.
00:27:16.960 | Parents should form a foreign language study association and devise ways to supplement and
00:27:23.680 | combat the schools. German children learn an amazingly good brand of English without ever
00:27:29.040 | crossing their borders. Why can't we? For one thing, we don't really want to, yet we should.
00:27:35.040 | An American who knows only English is blind in one eye. Corollary to this are the skills and
00:27:42.240 | experiences that come from travel, and the tolerances and curiosities about other sorts
00:27:47.600 | of people that only travel can produce. To travel well, efficiently, without fuss or complaint,
00:27:54.240 | without asking why porters are so stupid, or blaming the Italians for speaking their
00:27:59.200 | own language is no small accomplishment. But what I have in mind is a wider mental habit,
00:28:05.120 | an ability to think as a citizen of the world, to meet foreigners upon their own terms,
00:28:10.320 | to circulate freely and receptively in London without giving in to that
00:28:14.560 | curious chameleon temptation to be at the same time a little ashamed of one's own country,
00:28:19.920 | and to imitate the British. The British have it over us in two particulars.
00:28:24.880 | Their educated men talk well in public and handle their own language and speech and writing as if it
00:28:31.520 | were a familiar object. Our young man should be able to express himself clearly before a crowd of
00:28:37.600 | strangers without shyness, muddle, or a pathetic resort to "so much has been said and well said"
00:28:45.200 | or "I did not expect to be called on." Children somehow get over the terror of saying "how do you
00:28:51.040 | do" to strangers, but the American adult who can get to his feet, propose a toast,
00:28:56.080 | introduce a stranger, voice a civic protest, heckle a windbag politician,
00:29:01.920 | and give utterance to an unembarrassed thought is a museum piece.
00:29:06.960 | And a man should command the elementary tool of written language and be able to put simple
00:29:12.400 | things on paper in clear words, for in its essentials writing is not a mysterious art,
00:29:18.720 | but a human function as possible to learn as walking or eating.
00:29:23.280 | On the borderline between skills like these and book learning are all such things as a sound
00:29:30.240 | smattering of the theatre, painting, opera, a good workable understanding of the structure of
00:29:35.520 | business, investments, and banks, which in real life are not quite as they seem in the textbooks
00:29:41.360 | of economics. To these skills and knowledges I would emphatically add certain experiences.
00:29:48.320 | The educated young American male is in peril of too much shelter, too little danger and privation,
00:29:56.400 | and would be the richer if he had at some time in his life been without money and gone hungry for
00:30:02.080 | several days, been lost or shipwrecked, been robbed, been in jail, and spent a few months
00:30:08.880 | working as a common labourer. This last I place high on the list. Let every educated man, as a
00:30:15.760 | necessary part of his education, be thrown into the muddy stream of American industry and see
00:30:22.000 | what it is like to swim alone on daily wages. The list of extracurricular accomplishments
00:30:28.880 | must come to an end or our young friend will not pass his board examinations.
00:30:34.640 | One more desideratum. He should before reaching twenty-two have done something because he wanted
00:30:41.120 | to, whether other people wanted him to do it or not, sailed a boat on a perilous course, or shipped
00:30:48.080 | as a common seaman, or taken a job on a newspaper, or motored across the continent, or gone off to
00:30:54.480 | Europe on his own, or learned boiler-making, anything so long as it was his own idea.
00:31:02.640 | And how does one make healthy young middle-class Americans want to do something if all they want
00:31:07.440 | to do is enjoy themselves? If I knew that! And into the young man's bag of tricks I should
00:31:16.400 | certainly insert the accomplishment of not acquiring property unless he needs it.
00:31:21.920 | The other skills I have proposed for him will not cost much money, so that he will be able,
00:31:28.800 | and also tempted, to record the increase in his standard of living by adding to his furniture,
00:31:35.120 | by buying a better car or an oil furnace, by going in for collections of medieval armor
00:31:41.280 | or ancient coins, and similar surrenders to the magpie streak in all of us.
00:31:46.640 | Property quickly crowds out and preys upon less tangible pleasures, and is so often preferred to
00:31:54.880 | the fun one can have with one's body or one's mind, because the joy of its acquisition is so immediate
00:32:01.520 | and keen. Property of a decorative or useless nature is, indeed, often more fun in anticipation
00:32:09.280 | and at the moment of its acquisition than it ever is again. Insensitiveness to his personal property,
00:32:17.440 | unless, of course, it is extraordinarily beautiful, is a desirable skill for any man to have,
00:32:24.320 | and, like swimming, bridge, or German, it must be learned and worked at.
00:32:29.520 | What a ferocious program, you may say, and how in the world is it, or even a quarter of it,
00:32:36.080 | to be put into effect, granted a normal male specimen of the race? Only a fraction of it will
00:32:42.000 | be acquired in school, we all admit. Parents are busy, and except in rare cases, parents are the
00:32:48.160 | worst possible teachers of their own children who know them far too well. Summer camps can do some
00:32:53.840 | of it. American schools grant long holidays to their pupils from June to October, and the pupils,
00:33:00.160 | if left to themselves, use the holidays to wipe out as much education as possible, with a useless,
00:33:07.040 | unsystematic, healthy, good time. For this idle summer, the camps substitute a schedule of outdoor
00:33:14.480 | skills, and the boy who goes to summer camp usually comes back knowing how to swim, fish,
00:33:19.840 | paddle a canoe, toss a flapjack, and not cry too much when hurt. The skills taught by the summer
00:33:25.600 | camp end with outdoor sports. Yet parents are dimly aware of how little school teachers really
00:33:31.600 | teach, and cling to supplementary education like that of the summer camps when they can get it.
00:33:36.800 | Why not enlarge the camps and to their outdoor curriculum add German, taught as thoroughly as
00:33:43.360 | they teach canoeing? Why not, in fact, apply the basic principle of Americanism and have two
00:33:48.800 | systems of education competing against each other? On one side, the formal schools pouring contents
00:33:56.080 | into rebellious minds. On the other, summer camps, where the children are taught definite
00:34:02.000 | human skills, some of them much better taught than the schools can ever expect to do.
00:34:06.560 | Who knows, in course of time the competition might be too severe and the schools might go
00:34:12.080 | into receivership. Ah, I thought so. There is one skill I had forgotten. When, as the result of some
00:34:20.080 | trips to Europe, of much prodding on my part, and of summers spent at the kind of summer camp that
00:34:26.880 | does not yet exist, I am eventually confronted with a son who can make onion soup like Savarin,
00:34:34.160 | ride a horse like an Indian, play a difficult sonata, speak French and German like a native,
00:34:39.840 | and repair a leak in the roof. Will not there be something missing? Yes, an accomplishment
00:34:46.720 | vitally necessary to an American. Unusual though this young man may be, he should not seem so.
00:34:55.760 | For his own comfort, and for mine. Is not a parent's basic ambition for his child that he be
00:35:04.560 | very different from other people, yet manage to seem almost exactly like them?
00:35:10.080 | (This article titled "What the Young Man Should Know" by Robert Little was published in the
00:35:19.840 | March 1933 issue of Harper's Magazine.)
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