differ as to the value of Peary's deed, but that it stands as a
type of what success in any undertaking means, no one can deny. And this
was the lesson that these eighth-grade pupils were absorbing,--the
world-old lesson before which all others fade into insignificance,--the
lesson, namely, that achievement can be gained only by those who are
willing to pay the price.

And I imagine that when that class is studying the continent of Africa
in their geography work, they will learn something more than the names
of rivers and mountains and boundaries and products,--I imagine that
they will link these facts with the names and deeds of the men who gave
them to the world. And when they study history, it will be vastly more
than a bare recital of dates and events,--it will be alive with these
great lessons of struggle and triumph,--for history, after all, is only
the record of human achievement. And if those pupils do not find these
same lessons coming out of their own little conquests,--if the problems
of arithmetic do not furnish an opportunity to conquer the pressure
ridges of partial payments or the Polar night of bank discount, or if
the intricacies of formal grammar do not resolve themselves into the
North Pole of correct expression,--I have misjudged that teacher's
capacities; for the great triumph of teaching is to get our pupils to
see the fundamental and the eternal in things that are seemingly trivial
and transitory. We are fond of dividing school studies into the cultural
and the practical, into the humanities and the sciences. Believe me,
there is no study worth the teaching that is not practical at basis, and
there is no practical study that has not its human interest and its
humanizing influence--if only we go to some pains to search them out.

V

I have said that the most useful thing that education can do is to imbue
the pupil with the ideal of effortful achievement which will lead him to
do cheerfully and effectively the disagreeable tasks that fall to his
lot. I have said that the next most useful thing that it can do is to
give him a general method of solving the problems that he meets. Is
there any other useful outcome of a general nature that we may rank in
importance with these two? I believe that there is, and I can perhaps
tell you what I mean by another reference to a concrete case. I know a
man who lacks this third factor, although he possesses the other two in
a very generous measure. He is full