This is an excerpt taken from a treasure of a book published in 1924 called The Catholic Teacher’s Companion – A Book of Inspiration and Self-Help.
As we are all teachers in some form or other, this article is valuable.
It was originally written for teaching Sisters….
IDEALIZED WORK
Our pupils are largely governed by visions and ideals, and the duty of work should be presented to them in its idealistic aspects. What Carlyle has written in this connection is really a noble hymn on the dignity of work:
There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness in work. Were he ever so unenlightened, or forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works; in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.
Consider how, even in the meanest sort of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into real harmony. He bends himself with free valor against his task; and doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse, indignation, despair itself, shrink murmuring far off in their caves. The glow of labor in him is a purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up; and of smoke itself, there is made a bright and blessed flame.
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness; he has a life purpose.
Labor is life. From the heart of the worker rises the celestial force, breathed into him by Almighty God, awakening him to all nobleness, to all knowledge.
Hast thou valued patience, courage, openness to light, or readiness to own thy mistakes? In wrestling with the dim brute powers of fact, thou wilt continually learn.
For every noble work the possibilities are diffused through immensity, undiscoverable, except to faith. Man, son of heaven! is there not in thine inmost heart a spirit of active method, giving thee no rest till thou unfold it? Complain not. Look up, wearied brother. See thy fellow-workmen surviving through eternity, the sacred band of immortals.
The story of the three stone-cutters leaves nothing of wisdom to be said. They were working on a stone. A stranger asked the first what he was doing. “I’m working for $7.50 a day,” he replied.
“And you?” the stranger asked the second.
“I’m cutting this stone,” growled the laborer.
When the question was put to the third stone-cutter, he answered, “I’m building a cathedral.”
The Rev. Charles F. Connor, S.J., applied the principle underlying this story, when he suggested that we appeal to our boys on the following grounds:
“A duty is to be done because it is a duty whether we like it or not; whether the order is to study algebra or keep a trench; whether we are commanded to write an English composition or charge the enemy’s lines. They must be made to see that it is the sign of a yellow streak to desert one’s post whether that post is a writing desk in Pittsburgh or a dug-out in Flanders.”
There is a wise saying that nine-tenths of the noble work done in the world is drudgery, which is often misused as if it meant that nine-tenths of the drudgery done in the world is noble work. Yet given the proper motive, the latter statement would represent the truth. But it is vain to hope that we shall ever realize the ideal:
When no one shall work for money
And no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working.
Yet the teacher may even on moral grounds encourage her pupils to delight in work, for being forced to work and forced to do their best will beget in the young people temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues that the idle never know.
Devotion to study will make them independent of men and fortune, and give them a feeling of moderate self-sufficiency. The studious man never feels less alone than when alone. If busy enough with books, the young people will be like the sage that said he hadn’t time to worry. In the daytime he was too busy, and at night he was too tired.
It may not be possible for them to establish it as a rule of their life to make business a pleasure, and their pleasure a business. Yet with a love for work, they will experience the truth of Shakespeare’s line:
To business that we love, we rise betime—
And go to it with delight.
And by and by they may realize Carlyle’s wish in this regard:
“Give us, oh, give us the man who sings at his work! He will do more in the same time—he will do it better—he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible of fatigue while he marches to music. The very stars are said to make harmony as they revolve in their spheres. Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation in its power of endurance. Efforts, to be permanently useful, must be uniformly joyous, a spirit all sunshine, graceful from very gladness, beautiful because bright.”
THE BLESSINGS OF WORK
If the children learn the secret of imbuing their work with this spirit of joy, they may hope to convert all the workdays of their life into one joyous feast. And this may be true no matter how lowly their calling will turn out to be. It is to say that the happy life is the creative life, and that the sense of creation may be had in the domestic arts as in the fine arts, in the work of a cook as in the work of a statesman, in teaching, or cleaning windows, or bringing up a family, or driving a motor-car, or doing almost any kind of work that is not absolutely mechanical.
Without this creative pleasure in work, we doubt if there is any lasting happiness to be had by human beings. The great problem of society is the problem, not only of providing work, but of getting people to enjoy it. But to enjoy their work, they must be trained in their childhood and youth to do whatever they do with their whole heart and soul.
Work was the joy of Cardinal Manning’s heart. At work he was never alone, and never felt the loneliness of life. The joy and excitement of work fed the fires which toward the end of his life burnt low in body and mind. This joy, more than food, kept him alive. It was a balm to his spirit, a consolation, which no friends could give, to his heart.
The case of Cardinal Manning, who was very active even after he passed his eightieth year, would seem to prove that hard work is conducive not only to happiness but also to long life. But his case is not at all singular.
The Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, continued to write with undiminished vigor and effectiveness till past three score and ten; and Sophocles was more than eighty when he produced Oedipus Coloneus.
Plato taught in his famous academy until his death at eighty; and Thucydides, dying at seventy-five, left the history of the Peloponnesian Wars unfinished. Socrates began studying music when he was about eighty years of age.
In modern times the examples are still more numerous. Goethe finished Faust on the eve of his eighty-third birthday. Titian painted his famous “Battle of Lepanto” when he was ninety-eight. Alexander von Humboldt completed his Cosmos at eighty-eight. At the same age Commodore Vanderbilt was the most active railroad man of his day.
Newton, Voltaire, Herbert Spencer, Talleyrand, Jefferson, Gladstone, Bismarck, Tennyson, Mommsen, Willmann, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Newman, Manning—all these and hundreds of their contemporaries were very active after passing the fourscore mark.
The secret of attaining to old age, someone has said, is work, work, work. Many of these men certainly were among the world’s greatest workers. We are therefore justified in saying: Keep working, for the man who retires early is usually the man who dies early, at least inasfar as his soul is concerned. Show me the man who has ceased to struggle, and you show me the man whose soul is dead.
The work with books is particularly conducive to a vigorous intellectual life. John Lancaster Spalding illustrated in his own life the truth of his statement in this regard: “The more we learn to live in the serene air of delightful studies the longer do we retain the freshness and charm of youth.” Work in general is the best medicine for many bodily ills and for nearly all mental troubles.
ARE OUR PUPILS OVERWORKED?
Yet we are not unaware that some teachers and many more fond mothers believe that study is a dangerous thing for a growing boy, that persistent brain-work should be allowed him only under the most careful conditions, and taken away from him on the least excuse. But to allay these fears we shall quote the judgment of Dr. Charles L. Dana, of the Cornell Medical School, who made a thorough investigation of the consequences of fatigue in school children.
We quote from America: “Mental work is not only healthful for a growing child, but it is absolutely beneficial. There is nothing so important for him as to be impelled to do hard work, and to finish thoroughly a given task. If he works with the idea that the minute the sensation of ennui comes upon him, he should stop, his work will never be thorough or effective.”
Obliging members of the medical fraternity, Dr. Dana finds, have done their share in spreading the delusion that school children are generally overworked: “Teachers have told me that their desks were loaded with doctors’ certificates, advising this or that pupil to have a rest, or to be excused from a study that he did not like.”
Without doubt, serious harm both to mind and body may be the results of methods that are too exacting, but the effects of an unwise indulgence are far more disastrous. It is better that a child should suffer now and then from “brain fatigue” than that he should never be trained to use his brain at all.
Dr. Dana asserts that in his practice extending over thirty years, he has met with but one case of breakdown from what was said to be over-study, and that in this case, the youth was restored to health by providing him with a pair of spectacles.
The same writer declares that the children in Germany, France, and England work much harder at their books than do the children in this country, yet with no harm to their health. The only result of this intensive training is that by the time the American boy is eighteen or nineteen years old, he is at the very least, two years behind the German, French, or English boy.
Hence the teacher need have no fear about urging her pupils to follow Roosevelt’s advice: “Hit the line hard; don’t foul and shirk, but hit the line hard”; or to heed the same great American’s word about the strenuous life: “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, or labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardships, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”
Our young people should, indeed, realize that in this land of opportunity there is always room at the top; but that the only elevator thither is toil and effort. The good things come only to those who hustle while they wait. Life is not a sprint, but a Marathon. The prizes come only to those who combine with their opportunities power to keep everlastingly at it, or as Savonarola puts it, “Hold on, hold fast, hold out; patience is genius.”
The time of their schooling should be for our pupils “but the time to go a-fishing in.” They should make haste to live and to consider each day a new life. They might make their own the motto of Ruskin—To-day—and then write it on their hearts that every day is the best day of the year. A minute saved is a minute gained.
“Thrift of time,” says Gladstone, “will repay you in after-life with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and the waste of it would make you dwindle, all alike in intellectual and moral stature, beyond your darkest reckonings.”
Father Ryan, the poet-priest, confessed: “Better a day of strife than a century of sleep.”
The pithy inscription found on an old key, “If I rest I rust,” contains a forcible truth when referred to human action. Beware of the canker of rust. The idle man kills time, and time kills the idle man.
Let the teacher therefore spare no pains in habituating her pupils to hard work, and she will thus fit them for whatever kind of labor the Lord will apportion to them in their later life.
She should teach them the dignity of all labor in the spirit of Ruskin’s statement: “There must be work done by the hands or none of us would live, and work done by the brains or the life would not be worth having, and the same men cannot do both.”
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