g that is not easy and attractive.
It is only because there is so much in the world to be done that, for
the sake of economizing time and strength, we should raise the child as
quickly and as rapidly and as pleasantly as possible to the plane that
the race has reached. But among all the lessons of race experience that
we must teach him there is none so fundamental and important as the
lesson of achievement itself,--the supreme lesson wrung from human
experience,--the lesson, namely, that every advance that the world has
made, every step that it has taken forward, every increment that has
been added to the sum total of progress has been attained at the price
of self-sacrifice and effort and struggle,--at the price of doing things
that one does not want to do. And unless a man is willing to pay that
price, he is bound to be the worst kind of a social parasite, for he is
simply living on the experience of others, and adding to this capital
nothing of his own.

It is sometimes said that universal education is essential in order that
the great mass of humanity may live in greater comfort and enjoy the
luxuries that in the past have been vouchsafed only to the few.
Personally I think that this is all right so far as it goes, but it
fails to reach an ultimate goal. Material comfort is justified only
because it enables mankind to live more effectively on the lower planes
of life and give greater strength and greater energy to the solution of
new problems upon the higher planes of life. The end of life can never
be adequately formulated in terms of comfort and ease, nor even in
terms of culture and intellectual enjoyment; the end of life is
achievement, and no matter how far we go, achievement is possible only
to those who are willing to pay the price. When the race stops investing
its capital of experience in further achievement, when it settles down
to take life easily, it will not take it very long to eat up its capital
and revert to the plane of the brute.

III

But I am getting away, from my text. You will remember that I said that
the most useful thing that we can teach the child is to attack
strenuously and resolutely any problem that confronts him whether it
pleases him or not, and I wanted to be certain that you did not
misinterpret me to mean that we should, for this reason, make our school
tasks unnecessarily difficult and laborious. After all, while our
attitude should always be one of interesting our pupils, th