THE STUDY OF SCIENCES 31-56 The Discipline of Work 57-60
PART OF AN EDUCATION 61-87 The Uses of Hardship 89-92 The Public School 93-98
It seems that the Japanese have domesticated nature.
I always think of my school as my boyhood. Until I was big enough to swim the Missouri River my home was in a little Kansas town, and we boys lived in the woods and in the water all Summer, and in the woods and on the ice all Winter. We trapped and hunted, we rowed and fished, and built dams, and cut stick horses, and kept stick-horse livery stables where the grapevines hung, and where the paw-paws mellowed in the Fall. We made mud slides into our swimming hole, and we were artists in mud-tattoo, painting face and body with thin black mud and scraping white stripes from head to foot. We climbed the trees and cut our names, we sucked the sap of the box elder and squashed poke berries for war paint. We picked wild grapes and gooseberries, and made pop-guns to shoot green haws. In the Autumn we gathered walnuts, and in the Spring we greeted the johnny-jump-ups, and the sweet williams as they peered through the mold.
Always, we boys were out of doors, as it seems to me; and I did the chores. It is something to learn the toughness of hickory under the saw, how easily walnut splits, how mean elm is to handle; and a certain dexterity comes to a boy who teaches a calf to drink, or slops hogs without soiling his Sunday clothes in the evening. And the hay makes acrobats. In the loft a boy learns to turn flip-flops, and with a lariat rope he can make a trapeze. My rings were made by padding the iron rings from the hubs of a lumber wagon and swinging them from the rafters.
Bill, little Bethlehem Bill, has a better school than I had; the house and the things that go with it. Bill's teachers know more accurately what they are about than did my teachers in the old days out West half a century ago. And, of course, Bill is getting things from his school that I did not get. But he is growing up with a woefully distorted idea of life. What does Bill know about the woods and the flowers? Where in Bill's makeup is that which comes from browsing on berries and nuts and the rank paw paw, and roaming the woods like the Bander-log? And the crops, what does he know about them?