Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/53

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settles firmly down at the point of view to which his circumstances have driven him. In that case, there is a fair likelihood that in his leisure hours he will become a tedious utilitarian critic of his own upbringing. He will complain of the liberal education which unsettles youth and fills it with insatiable hungers by attempting to develop a general human personality instead of a sharp vocational instrument. He will turn around upon his Alma Mater and condemn her harshly for not having cut away, at an earlier age, all the young unprofitable shoots of his general human curiosity. He may declare that the fault of his education was its failure to make him an even keener, harder, sharper vocational instrument than he is.

"What good," he will say, "have history and literature and philosophy ever done to me? You teachers pumped me full of culture. You filled me up with stuff about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the Reformation and the Puritan Revolution. You wasted my youth in talk about the real and the ideal and the good and the beautiful. You lured me into listening to symphonies and looking at pictures and vibrating to the pity and terror of tragic drama. You peopled the greenwood of my imagination with poetic figures of knights and ladies on great adventures and romantic quests. And then I married a fairly good cook and you sent me into the world to serve as a chemist in a dye works or to write advertising for toothpowder and laundry soap. My education was not