mere noise, don't you dare teach a high
school, for you are not big enough nor deep enough to do that.

The great question, after all, is not how much learning have you been able
to put into him, but how much of the finer ambitions, how much power, how
deeply and strongly they hunger for the very best. An ounce of inspiration
at this time is worth more than a pound or a ton of learning; I am no foe
of learning, either. The high school is and will remain the people's
college. It is the only college that a great part of the people ever will
know. Do not neglect that great fraction who are never going to get
anything higher and beyond in order to put your time on those who are going
on to colleges and universities. You must be the people's support, and you
may well thank fortune that it doesn't seem to be nine-tenths of your
business out here in the West to fit boys and girls for a college
examination. If that ever threatens to become your business, then you
withstand it and face it to the death, for there is nothing will ruin
education faster than that; I know sorrowfully whereof I speak.

You remember in "Pilgrim's Progress" that when Christian had left the
Interpreter's House, he strayed away and went down into the Valley of
Humiliation, where he walked between the snares and was in danger of
falling into many a pitfall; there he wandered through darkness; there he
could not see the Delectable Mountains any more, and there he fought with
Giant Apollyon for his life; but when Christian passed that way he did not
find it half so bad by any means. He had a companion by the name of Great
Heart, remember, and Great Heart said to him, "Do you know that the soil of
this valley is probably the most fertile that the crow flies over?"

The Valley of Humiliation, my friends, stretches sharp and clear athwart
the life of every man and woman between the Interpreter's House of his
early education and of his dreams and visions, and the Delectable
Mountains, and we all have to depart to it whether we will or no, and it is
the most fertile soil that the crow flies over, for in that Valley of
Humiliation men's muscles and nerves become steel, and man becomes the
shadow of the great rock in the Weary Land, and through heartaches the man
and the woman are made the soldiers and the choice heroes of Jehovah
Himself. It is into that Valley of Humiliation that the boy and the girl
are going to go from school after they leave you, and you must