ht be
excellent artisans. The knowledge of books is in no sense the whole
story nor the only means of education. In devotion to some craft or
in the intelligent conduct of some business they might find the true
education, which is the conscious discipline of one's powers. The
man who can do things, whether with his hands or with his brain,
provided intelligence govern the exercise of hand and brain, and
who finds happiness in his work because it is the expression of
himself, is an educated man. The end of education is the building of
personality, the making of human power, and its fruit is wisdom.

Wisdom, however, does not consist in the most extensive knowledge
of facts. Oftentimes information overweights a man and snuffs out
what personal force there might otherwise have been. On the futility
of mere learning there is abundant testimony. Walt Whitman, as we
might expect from his passion for the vital and the human, has said:
"You must not know too much and be too precise and scientific
about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft. A certain free
margin, perhaps ignorance, credulity, helps your enjoyment of these
things and of the sentiment of feather'd, wooded, river or marine
nature generally. I repeat it--don't want to know too exactly or the
reasons why." Even Ruskin, whose learning was extensive and
various, bears witness to the same effect. He notes "the diminution
which my knowledge of the Alps had made in my impression of
them, and the way in which investigation of strata and structure
reduces all mountain sublimity to mere debris and wall-building." In
the same spirit he planned an essay on the Uses of Ignorance. From
the midst of his labors in Venice he wrote: "I am sure that people
who work out subjects thoroughly are disagreeable wretches. One
only feels as one should when one doesn't know much about the
matter." In other words, we are not to let our knowledge come
between us and our power to feel. In thus seeming to assail
education I am not seeking to subvert or destroy; I want simply to
adjust the emphasis. The really wise man is he who knows how to
make life yield him its utmost of true satisfaction and furnish him
the largest scope for the use of his powers and the expression of
himself. In this sense a newsboy in the streets may be wiser than a
university professor, in that one may be the master of his life and the
other may be the servant of his information. Education should have
for its end t