Chapter 61 - Page 2

scholar, and through him to the country.

At home I once made a speech deploring the injuries inflicted by the high
school in making handicrafts distasteful to boys who would have been
willing to make a living at trades and agriculture if they had but had
the good luck to stop with the common school. But I made no converts.
Not one, in a community overrun with educated idlers who were above
following their fathers' mechanical trades, yet could find no market for
their book-knowledge. The same rail that brought me the letter from the
Punjab, brought also a little book published by Messrs. Thacker, Spink &
Co., of Calcutta, which interested me, for both its preface and its
contents treated of this matter of over-education. In the preface occurs
this paragraph from the Calcutta Review. For "Government office" read
"drygoods clerkship" and it will fit more than one region of America:

"The education that we give makes the boys a little less clownish in
their manners, and more intelligent when spoken to by strangers. On
the other hand, it has made them less contented with their lot in
life, and less willing to work with their hands. The form which
discontent takes in this country is not of a healthy kind; for, the
Natives of India consider that the only occupation worthy of an
educated man is that of a writership in some office, and especially
in a Government office. The village schoolboy goes back to the plow
with the greatest reluctance; and the town schoolboy carries the
same discontent and inefficiency into his father's workshop.
Sometimes these ex-students positively refuse at first to work; and
more than once parents have openly expressed their regret that they
ever allowed their sons to be inveigled to school."

The little book which I am quoting from is called "Indo-Anglian
Literature," and is well stocked with "baboo" English--clerkly English,
hooky English, acquired in the schools. Some of it is very funny,
--almost as funny, perhaps, as what you and I produce when we try to write
in a language not our own; but much of it is surprisingly correct and
free. If I were going to quote good English--but I am not. India is
well stocked with natives who speak it and write it as well as the best
of us. I merely wish to show some of the quaint imperfect attempts at
the use of our tongue. There are many letters in the book; poverty
imploring help--bread, money, kindness, office generally an office, a
clerkship, some way to get food and a rag out of the applicant's
unmarketable education; and food not for himself alone, but sometimes for
a dozen helpless relations in addition to his own family; for those
people are astonishingly unselfish, and admirably faithful to