SCHOOL OR BUSINESS

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 2, 1880

SCHOOL OR BUSINESS.

YOUR boy is fourteen years old. You are considering the question whether you shall take him out of school and put him into business. In the shop he can earn his living at once. In school he costs you from $300 to $800 a year. Even if he goes to a public school his board at home costs something and he earns nothing. And what is the use of his learning Latin, Greek and Algebra for the practical affairs of life? Will his musa, musae, musae, and his x, y and z ever enable him to sell more calicoes for more cents a yard, or to get more bushels of wheat out of an acre of ground, or even to convince a jury of practical Americans that his client is entitled to $1,000 damages from the railway company that smashed his trunk or by its delay caused him to miss an important appointment? He can read, write and speak the English language correctly; why not apprentice him to his trade and let him begin? Shall I keep him in school or put him to business? That is a question a great many fathers are considering this winter and every winter.

Keep him in school.

He that apprentices his boy chooses his career for him. If he is put into a store it is very unlikely he will ever become a lawyer; if into a lawyer's office it is hardly probable that he will emerge a civil engineer. By putting him into business you decide what business he shall go into. But you can no more tell what your boy of fourteen ought to be at forty than you can tell what an unlabelled paper of seeds will become if planted. He is a mere bundle of possibilities. What life has for him you cannot foresee.

A purely business education is always a narrow education. It develops a particular power and leaves others undeveloped. It tends to make lopsided men; men of narrow horizons; men of limited abilities; that is, of abilities limited to a single sphere of action. The boy who goes into a store at fourteen to stay till he is twenty-one may graduate a capital salesman, but he will learn nothing else in his school but how to sell goods; and life may have some other service. The boy who graduates at college at twenty-one will not know how to do any one thing as well as his mercantile companion, but he will be able to learn how to do any one of a hundred things.—Exchange.