CHAPTER 31

THE man just came to fix one of our dictaphones. He is the machinist who keeps in repair all the dictaphones in this territory. Also he is the salesman who sells all the machines in this territory. He is a bright young fellow, thirty-one years old and doesn't look it. He looks like a born machinist with a salesman's education. An education gained in the grammar school plus a thorough course in the university of salesmen's hard knocks. Clear eyed, level glancing, alert, neat, and reasonably well dressed. But evidently a machinist rather than an educated and cultured salesman.

I had a very pleasant and instructive visit with this salesman. He has a wife and eight small children. Also he has his brother's wife and two small children, one a baby of seven months. The brother could not stand the economic pressure with a wife and two small children, so he got out from under, leaving this young man with a wife, a sister-in-law, and ten children, all under one roof. He is proud and happy in his responsibility, and in his very evident victories over circumstances.

"I tell you we have good times at our house," he said. "I have seven little boys and one girl of my own, and there is no lack of interest in life. Ten little ones run to climb all over me when I come in at night. There are thirteen of us at the table, a lucky, happy, hilarious thirteen. After the meal is over everybody has his work. Tom picks up all the knives. Jim picks up all the forks. Bob gathers the teaspoons. Little Leo collects the saucers and carries them out, and Jim and Joe carry out the plates and cups. In about three minutes by the clock all the dishes are neatly stacked in the kitchen, the tablecloth is shaken and folded up and put away. Every child has his own part of the work and nothing would tempt him to let another one of the children do it in his stead. Efficiency in the kitchen, you know.

"In half an hour the dishes are all washed up and put away, and we assemble to hold court. We hold court every night! I am the judge! It is fun, I tell you! We begin with the oldest boy and he stands up and tells us his opinion about something. Then the next one has his chance. And all the others keep silent and listen till their turns come. It is fun to see how eager they are sometimes to break in, but the judge never allows it. Everything is done in order and the judge decides all differences. Oh, it is great fun, I tell you. I never go to a club nor a theater, nor even a baseball game — there is more fun with those ten children and my wife and sister- in-law. We have debates, too, on all sorts of subjects, and we observe the rules for debating.

"Oh, I tell you they are lively youngsters, and just as healthy and full of spirit as little animals. And they can eat anything! They all go to bed at half past eight every evening, and then we older ones sit quietly and talk things over. Except once in a while when I come in from work late, and then maybe I get them all out of bed and we have a nice little supper around the table. We do have gay times, in spite of their mother's frown. Then after our spread we hustle all the things out into the kitchen and wash them up and slick up ready for their mother to get breakfast in the morning.

"My wife takes care of all my money and spends everything for the house and for the children. We manage things carefully and we have everything we need and more. We have good things to eat and a good house to live in and good clothes. People can always get along, you know, if they are careful and work together. My wife is a wonder at managing things. And my sister-in-law helps, too, and we just get along fine.

"And my seven boys are all learning to be salesmen. You would laugh to see what happens nearly every night when I go into the house. Every one of the boys plays salesman from the oldest to the youngest only three years old. Every one has a little bag and he has his samples in his little bag — these little bags that you get at the ten-cent store. You would laugh to see the way they come up and play salesmen with me. I'm called all sorts of names from Jones and Smith and Brown to Montmorency and Snitsky. A little fellow will come and stand around and wait for me to pay attention to him, just as if I were a great magnate in some big mill and he was waiting politely to get shows me his samples and explains them to me, and I bring up all the objections I can. And when he presents good enough arguments I buy and give him an order. He enters my order in his little book, and says all sorts of nice polite little things to me and bids me good afternoon. Then the next boy comes with his bag. Sometimes one boy will come back two or three times in an evening, and very often he has a different line of samples to show every time. I tell you it is wonderful to see the way those little boys imitate the grown up salesmen and how they are catching on to the proper way to approach prospective buyers, and present their arguments and get the order. Why it is more fun than any play in a theater, just to watch those little fellows. And they are all so bright and good looking and healthy and successful. Why, they show success all over them even now, and the oldest of them is only fourteen years old."

How about their schooling? I queried.

"Oh, they are all going to school just as long as they can. And they are bright little boys, too, and learn fast."

Good! I like to hear you say that. Be sure you see that every one of your boys goes all the way through the high school at least. Then if any one of them wants to go to college be sure to make it possible for him to go. You see, school education will make them still brighter and more efficient salesmen. For instance, you yourself could have sold a higher line of goods and earned much greater pay at your age if you had had a college education to begin on. Don't you think so?

He looked at me thoughtfully a moment. "Yes," he answered. "I believe that is so. I know that for lack of schooling I cannot express myself in as good English as I ought to, and for that reason I am not as good a salesman as I might have been. I know all the practical side of it, but I do not make as good an impression as if I could use better English and talk on a wider range of topics. I believe you are right, and you may be sure I shall see that my boys get all the education they possibly can."

And, I continued, be sure you encourage them to take up the technical and manual training work that is given in the schools now. You live where they have wonderfully fine schools of that sort. And I want to tell you that no man can come up thinking straight unless he has learned to do exact and thorough work with his hands. Therein lies the secret of the crookedness in so many men who live by salesmanship. They never learned to do useful and exact work with their hands, and therefore they cannot do useful and exact thinking. All educators are recognizing the necessity for this proving of the thinking by doing exact and thorough work with the hands. The careful use of the level and the square and the saw and the hammer will train children to think on the level and act on the square. That is why all educators are working to incorporate manual training and the homely arts and crafts and technical training in grammar school work and in high school work. The most hopelessly slovenly worker I ever employed was a woman who had never learned to do any useful thing with her hands. Her thinking was just as slovenly and inaccurate as her work.

True education involves the drawing forth of the capacities of the head, the hands, and the heart.

You are evidently beginning right with your children — they are certainly exercising their little hearts and yours in your beautiful home life. And they are exercising their heads to some extent. Now see that they get education for the hands and still more education for the head. Don't make the mistake of sacrificing the education of the hands and the head to the earning of a little money when the boys reach the age when all boys want to quit school and go to earning.

The boy who quits at fourteen may earn more when he is twenty-one, but from twenty-one to thirty-five his earning capacity will rise very, very slowly. On the other hand, the boy who goes to high school and then to college may not be drawing as much salary when he is twenty-one, but he will draw considerably more salary when he is thirty- five, and the arc of his earning power will continue to rise for some time after that. And it will never sink to the same level that his earning capacity would if he stopped education when he had gone only as far as the grammar school. Statistics prove this without a shadow of doubt.

You hear a lot of talk about college being unnecessary to success in life. If by success in life you mean mere money making I will agree that the young man who goes into business when he quits the grammar school may reach the height of his earning power younger in life. But he will not continue to rise beyond that. You know that the less a man has in his head the more he must depend upon his physical energy. Physical energy is on the wane after forty or forty-five. The man of sixty-five who has to depend upon his physical energy to earn his living is certain to find himself in very poor circumstances. The man who has developed his intellect will at the age of sixty-five find himself managing to live without depending too much upon his physical energy. That is one reason why life grows more beautiful with every year to the man who is educated, while the life of the uneducated man grows less beautiful and less interesting after he has reached the zenith of his physical powers at the age of about forty or forty-five.

And there is another side to this matter of education. You have no interest now at thirty-one years of age except your business and your family, have you?

"No, I have just those two interests, but they are enough."

I said: But what will become of your home interests in twenty-five years from now? Your children will then be scattered maybe to the four winds. Your home as a home will contain nobody but yourself and your wife. Possibly it will contain no wife. What of your home interests then? They will be but a memory. And memories are not very exhilarating as a steady diet. And what of your business interests? If you go on making money as you are doing now, the time will come when you will be tired of making money. Don't you think so?

“Y-e-s”

Well, and then what will you do for a real interest to keep life worth living? Of course it is just possible that you can sit by the fireside and enjoy your grandchildren. But that will grow tiresome, too. You will be tired of making money because it will be an old story to you. Your own children will be grown up and in their own homes. What will be your interests then?

Now this is exactly where education comes in. The longer you go to school the more things you will know about this world and the people in it, and the principles upon which it is built and the things that have been accomplished, the more points of interest, the more POINTS OF CONTACT you will have with this world. In other words, the more interest you will have in this world. These interests you will need to fall back upon as you grow older. You will need every one of these that you can get, if you would enjoy a long life.

There is another way to look at it. Every generation of the world comes in on the shoulders of the preceding generation. In a sense your children inherit not only your nature, but they inherit your schooling. They inherit your nature possibly before they are born, but what they inherit before they are born is only the smallest portion of what they gain by inheritance. We keep on inheriting from our parents, our friends, our books, and our companions, as long as we live. Your children inherit your use of the English language. If you let your children stop at the grammar school where you stopped they inherit just what you worked out in your generation. If you send them on to high school you give them something beyond what you worked out in your day. And by giving them something beyond what you worked out you are helping along evolution. The evolution of the human race comes in just this way. Don't let your family share of the evolution of the human race stop because you are in too big a hurry to have your children get along in the business world. All your children are due by the laws of evolution and progress to go through the high school, since you stopped at the grammar school, and one or maybe more of your children has it in him to go on through college and reach a higher altitude of intellectual development than the others. He may set a new pace for your family. If any of your boys want to go through college, better help them to do it, and thus help evolution along the faster.

You see this matter of schooling is something that begins at the very cradle. It is nothing more than the passing on of the wisdom of the world to the new arrivals in the world. When your baby began to toddle around the floor, did you say, "Now you can walk you have to get out and walk and depend upon yourself?" If you had said that the little one, in gaining by absolutely unguided experience what you perhaps gained by unguided experience — you being an exceptional and not merely the average man — your baby in gaining through his own experience would perhaps toddle into the fireplace and disfigure himself for life. Did you leave that little baby so unguided when he first began to walk? No, of course not. You fended him with your own wisdom. You said to yourself that the little one might toddle into the fire, not knowing any better, so you would be handy to stand between him and the fire and to guide him in a better direction instead of allowing him to go by his own little ignorant ideas and according to his untrained will.

Well, all schools do for children exactly what you did for that little baby when he first began to walk. They aim to pass on the wisdom of all the ages of experience of human beings in such a form that it will keep the young from toddling into the fireplaces of life — into bad habits of erratic thinking and living. The schools aim now to give for the head and the hands exactly that sort of guidance that you and your wife in your love give to the little baby's physical being.

The schools pass on the race wisdom to the children. It takes the home school plus the social school to make the all round efficient human.

To be sure the schools also pass along some foolishness. But with every year they are passing less and less foolishness, and more and more wisdom. And because they do pass along some foolishness is no more reason for ignoring and refusing to profit by their wisdom for your children, than the occasional carelessness of a parent who lets his child run into the fire is a good reason for dispensing with all mothers and fathers and allowing the little child to learn by itself how to toddle and where to toddle.

The parents and teachers pass the wisdom of the world on to the child, who receives it skeptically and suggests improvements as he works it out. Thus do we see evolution in the making. Our children need all the education we can help them to. And we need all they can pass back to us!

"I believe you are right," he answered. "I shall think this over carefully and you may depend I shall be more decided than ever upon doing all I can to keep my children in school just as long as they will make good use of the schooling. And now I have enjoyed this conversation immensely, and I must get along to Mr. Blank's where I have just put in nine new dictaphones and they are waiting for me to show the girls how to use them. If your dictaphone gets out of order again let me know and I will come and fix it."

Thank you. And I have enjoyed the visit, too. And we have both got something out of it, I think.

(And I sat down and talked this into the repaired dictaphone.)

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