Should Students Study?/Chapter VI

by William Trufant Foster

"I suppose all this is intended to spur me to greater effort," says the student of mediocre record. "What is the use? I am no genius."

No more are most men who are called successful. Genius has been defined as "an infinite capacity for taking pains." Edison has put the matter more epigrammatically, if not more elegantly, in calling genius 1 per cent. inspiration and 99 per cent. perspiration. Neither definition is adequate. What the world calls genius has never been accounted for solely by hard work. If both inspiration and perspiration are necessary for success, it is nonsense to ask which is more important. They have no common measure. We do not venture to say whether sodium or chlorine is the more important element of salt.

The purpose of these definitions is to stress the fact that the advantage of men and women who are accounted successful over all others is seldom genius; the difference is due not so much to native endowment of vision, imagination, and brilliance of mind as to industrious persistence in the pursuit of definite aims. The prancing race-horse makes a spectacular appearance, but he fails you in the long run. He is all speed and no control—useless for a steady job.

We do not mean to say that any man, by taking thought and keeping at it, can add enough cubits to his stature to become a Chopin, or a Shelley, or a Pasteur, or—we should add—even an Edison, great as his capacity for taking pains and his tireless industry. What we do mean to say is that the genius of such men is enjoyed by exceedingly few of the men and women who are regarded by the world as highly successful. Mr. Roosevelt, for example, can hardly be called a genius. He himself insists that all he has accomplished is due to dogged persistence and a capacity for hard work. Without these qualities, not a human being—genius or no genius—has ever attained a great success. All the "just-as-good-as" men have not yet found a substitute for hard work.

Between Galileo, Goethe, Mendelsson, and the rank and file of men there appears to be a hopeless difference of endowment; but between the large body of fairly successful men and the larger body of less successful men the determining difference appears to be the degree and persistence of effort. No one need to be a genius to improve his standing in life.

In fact, the boy who is not a genius and who knows it, who expects to gain nothing easily, and who early forms the habit of striving to do his best, has far better chances of ultimate success than the boy of brilliant parts who easily surpasses him in school without half trying, and who thus gets used to giving less than his best.

Most of our schools and colleges in America are inadequate challenges to youth of superior talents. Such youth are, therefore, in greater danger than their companions of moderate ability, for whom our institutions are primarily conducted. If we took the solicitous care of the 5 per cent. of the abnormally brilliant as we do of the 5 per cent. if the abnormally dull, we would not retard the superior students with standards of mediocrity. We should require them to do their best, regardless of the "standards" of their school. "The worst fault," says Professor Canby, "into which out age-long service of mediocrity has led us is a weakneed, pusillanimous deference to mediocrity itself. The college has borrowed the vice from every-day American life." For a boy of sound health and really superior parts to spend four years in meeting the usual, actually required "requirements" of a "standard high school" or of a "standard college" is pretty hard on the boy. However great the promise of youth, it is not likely to become the performance of manhood if the candidate habitually falls short of the possible performances of youth.

Exceptions that Test the Rule

There are evidently other exceptions to the rule that the promise of youth becomes the performance of manhood. These exceptions are doubtless due in part to the fact that our unscientific methods of grading sometimes record the passing moods or the permanent idiosyncrasies of teachers as well as the achievements of students. School marks are not always what they seem to be. Professor Jones gives a boy 78 per cent. in history. Seventy-eight per cent. of what? Nobody knows. Definite per cents. of undefined quantities deceive us by the appearance of exactness. Professor Black gives another boy 93 per cent. in Latin. Ninety-three per cent. of what? We can only guess.

Much worse for our present purposes is the fact that we have no means of comparing the work of the two boys. Whether attaining a grade of 78 in history is more or less of a triumph than attaining a grade of 93 in Latin, we do not know. In certain institutions with which we are familiar we think we do know; but the large bodies of statistics here used as evidence are necessarily taken at face value. The shortcomings of our methods of marking students, until recently in almost universal use, surely amount for some of the cases in which academic distinction has not led to corresponding distinction in later life.

Other cases are due to the sudden appearance in later life of more powerful impulses for work than those of school years. A boy who has sauntered along the primrose paths of college life contrives to graduate. Suddenly he faces death, or loses his property, or falls in love, or goes to war, and forthwith he is a man born again. Inheritance, which always preponderates over environment, now forms an alliance with incentive. Traits which, with adequate motives, would have won their way to class honors are now put to hard work. Success comes! And lo, how many nimble minds there are to jump from a single case of the generalization that studies do not count.

Yes, there are exceptions. As a college undergraduate, you have as much right as any man to count on being one of them, and it is the most comforting thought you can cherish. Of course the law of chance is overwhelmingly used against you; but all courts are notoriously slow in dealing out justice. While you wait, nobody can prove that you are not an exception, and you can rest secure in the belief that the law can never catch you. Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow you do not expect to die.

There is another group of students to whom we should pay our respects—those who drop out before graduation. The Commencement program is not as respectful to them as a newspaper in reporting a horse-race; it does not even mention the fact that they "also ran." Yet many of them assure us that they could do well in their studies if they cared to take the trouble. What shall we say to them? Chiefly this: that "not caring to take the trouble" is itself an alarming symptom. Ability without the disposition to use it is like gasoline without a spark. It wins no races. It would seem that dropping out of college not only implies a predisposition to drop out of every race before the finish, but as well a smaller chance of life itself. Of five Harvard classes, twenty-five years after graduation, only 15 per cent. of those who had graduated were dead, and 32 per cent. of those who dropped out before graduating.

It is true that some colleges are so loosely put together that a student can loaf until the last week of the term and then scrape through by a kind of death-bed repentance. Not so in the severer trials of life beyond the campus. "In the moral world," as Charles R. Brown puts it, "a man is judged not by the few holy emotions he can scramble together in the last fifteen minutes of earthly existence; he is judged by the whole trend and drift of his life." And this is just. What a man is content to be, day after day, when all runs smoothly, that, in all probability, he will find himself to be when a crisis comes. It is evident that no man in a responsible position can meet a crisis safely with the kind of effort that in college brings the grade of mediocrity.

"Luck Beats Science Every Time"

In much that I have said about success I have used the mathematical term "chance," a term as far removed as any term could be from the popular notion of luck. If all these studies prove anything, they prove that there is a long chain of causal connections binding together the achievements of a man's life and explaining the success of a given moment. That is the non-skid chain that keeps him safe in slippery places. Luck is about as likely to strike a man as lightning, and about as likely to do him any good. The best luck a young man can have is the firm conviction that there is no such thing as luck, and that he will gain in life just about what he deserves, and no more. The man who is waiting around for something lucky to turn up has time to see a preparedness parade pass by him—the procession of those who have formed the habit of turning things up. In a saloon at a prairie station in Montana I saw the sign, "Luck beats science every time." That is the motto of the gambler—in the saloon and in the class-room. But all men who have won durable distinction are proof that science beats luck—science operating through the laws of heredity and habit.

Even fathers who have proved all this in their own lives are loath to try it on their sons. "What I most enjoy," says Doctor Crothers, "is to experiment with a successful self-made man." He is an easy mark and will pay liberally for an educational gold brick. He has made his own way in the world by force of ability and hard work. But when it comes to his son, he is the most credulous creature alive. He is ready to believe that something can be had for nothing. When he sends his son to college the last thing he thinks of is that the lad will have to work for all that he gets. He has an idea that a miracle of some kind is about to be performed in the enchanted castle of the Liberal Arts. The boy will have all sorts of things done for him. He will get mental discipline, which is a fine thing to have. Certain studies are rich in discipline. If he doesn't elect these disciplinary studies he will doubtless get all the mental discipline he needs by living in the same town with a number of hard-working professors. Every college which has been a long time on the same spot has ideals. The youth is supposed to get these ideals, though he is unconscious of them at the time. In after-years they will be explained to him at the class reunions and he will be glad that he absorbed them. Toward the end of his college course he will show signs of superiority to his parents, and there will be symptoms of world-weariness. He will be inclined to think that nothing is quite worth while. That tired feeling is diagnosed as 'Culture.'"