Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/362

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354
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

founding libraries, is promoting technical education and is organizing a great technical institution as the noblest contribution of which he can conceive for the benefit of those working men to whom he owes so much and indebtedness to whom he so freely acknowledges. His great pupil, Mr. Schwab, while encouraging the penniless boy to begin bravely at the bottom and to work hopefully toward the top, still more emphatically declares his respect for learning, and his high estimate of the desirability of more general education, by himself organizing a trade-school for Pittsburgh. A very large part of the work of founding schools and colleges and universities and every form of higher, as well as primary, education, outside the common-school system of the United States, has been already done, and is being performed more and more generally and liberally and generously by this very class of men. Rockefeller builds up Chicago University; Ezra Cornell, uneducated and once in poverty, nevertheless gives all his surplus, once secured, to found a university in which 'any man may find instruction in any study' and interests himself most of all in providing for the poor man's son; Hiram Sibley, owing his millions to the same sturdy, manly and vigorous spirit, fighting his way from the bottom to the top, finds his noblest pleasure in organizing a college in which the education of the young mechanic and engineer may be carried up into the realms of applied science and the highest departments of professional work.

Lawrence and Sheffield, Case and Rose and Rensselaer, and the numerous other great philanthropists who have founded schools and colleges, even the most thoroughly educated and most cultured of all amongst them, it must be remembered, had no such educational opportunities as are offered the young men and women of to-day. The coming generation is to be comparatively highly educated people, and the man who is to succeed in dealing with the new, the modern, man must, more than ever before, have something of that culture. Highest success will only come of education and culture combined with a thorough scientific, professional preparation for the most advanced positions in the industrial or professional organization. In the past generations few men were given, or could be given, even the academic education of the time; to-day, almost any man who has the wish and a real determination to succeed may secure a good education of the kind which he may most desire. In the last generation the competition for the high places and grand prizes, outside the then so-called learned professions, occurred between uneducated men, as a rule; in the generations now coming forward that competition will be between men who have not only the brain and the native talent, but also, and superadded to all that the older type of man possessed, that kind of systematic training which makes the intellectual as well as the physical gynmast, that scientific instruction which provides learning that finds its peculiar