The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1875-01-13
Education and Everyday Life.

Euucnuon ana Everyday AAIo'
A Richmond paper gives voice to a senti-
ment which, unfortunately, finds acceptance
In field much broader than the limits OF
Virginia, in saying that large number of the
young men Of the State are ''too well educated
for practical purposes The fallacy embodied
in that brief sentence is 80 far inwrought into
the popular belief as to be the fruitful cause
of an enormous amount of ineHiciency, with
its resultant poverty and misery. All over
the country, not alone in the great cities, are
to be found in large numbers men and women
who, in virtue Of certain, or rather, very
uncertain, amount of literary culture, hold
themselves aloof from and above the COM
moner occupations of everyday life. They
apparently expect their education, such as it
is, in some mysterious and miraculous man
ner to lift them above the necessity Of daily
toll, and to bring them comfort, if not luxury,
in whose production ''the sweat Of their
brow" shall have had no place Every, jour
nalist, every professional man, every mer-
chant every woman who has earned her
own place in the world by vigor-
GUS and persistent endeavor, is well
acquainted with class of appli-
cants for aid and counsel who shave had
an education" who are willing to do any
thing" yet who are wholly unfit to do any
thing outside of certain overcrowded and
poorly paid avenues of employment and
who lack the moral stamina or the common
sense to put such culture as they have into
the work that is waiting to be done even if it
be less dainty.
The trouble is not that they are "too well
educated but that their education, whatever
it includes, lacks the highest essential quality
of all worthy culture, the perception that it is
in itself means not an end but force, a
power, factor of value in the attainment Of
higher objects and that it's greatest use
inheres in enabling the worker to do WELL to
dignity and to elevate whatever work lies
where his hand may find it to do
The cry Of distress from those 'stoo well
educated for practical purposes" as our
contemporary puts it, goes up continually, but
sounds always more mournfully with the
incoming Of winter. It would be as vain for
journal as for an individual to attempt to
give aid or counsel in each one of thousands
of cases. In point of fact the majority
of those who have sunk into habits of
inef6ciency from rejecting the idea that their
education should be applied to the commoner
work Of everyday life, while waiting for easier
or more aristocratic avenues of labor to open
for them, will not recognize themselves or
will resent tho portraiture. But it may be
we'll for good many young men and women
to whom are just presented the issues Of SELF
support, Of life worth living and of character
worth having. and into whose ears has been
dinned the idea that education is too dainty q
possession to be used in ennobling drudgery-
it may be well for some such to consider
whether mental calibre and culture may not
find room for as broad and as elevated play in
mechanical or agricultural or domestic labor
as in the avenues Of professional work. In
the professions it is the few who attain emil
nence, and the work which secures compe-
tence is as fatiguing and as persistent as the
day laborer's. Even social consideration,
which is apt to be their idol, waits to ia,
greater degree than the educated inefficient
class are apt to believe on ones self than on
ones employment