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We all know that a good education is important. This month, Dr. Crane examines what we mean by "education" as well as how important it is to our lives.
Gregg Speed Building, One-Year Course, Gregg Publishing Company, 1940, p 156-157
Education as an Asset to Success
No matter what a man’s work, he can do it better if he is well informed. And the point here is that education, while it has a larger bearing than a mere preparation for one’s trade or profession, is the very best equipment for any sort of efficiency.
Whatever your peculiar calling, your expertness is more telling if it rests upon a basis of general culture.
As a stenographer, you will do better work and your chances of advancement are much greater if you are familiar with history, know your Shakespeare, and are not in doubt as to whether Botticelli is “the name of a cheese or a violin.”
As a lawyer, a doctor, or a preacher, your reputation will very likely rest as much upon “all aroundness”—your wide acquaintance with the inside of great books and the general impression that you are not a narrow-minded specialist—as it will upon your technical finish.
Culture means intellect, background.
It means accumulated force behind your stroke.
It means that you are not only capable yourself but also that you know how to absorb and use the capability of wiser persons.
It gives you perspective.
It increases your personality.
I strengthens your influence.
It keeps you from settling down to become a mere cog in the wheel, a little specialized piece of machinery to do a certain task and makes you a human being, alive, vibrant, radiating.
It makes you Somebody, not just Anybody.
Many a mother has realized too late that she has no hold upon her children because of her lack of knowledge.
Many a man has risen in the business world only to be humiliated because he has neglected to acquire that education which alone would qualify him to mingle on terms of equality with well-informed people. In fact, no man or woman who has neglected an education does not bitterly regret it sooner or later.
And no living person was ever sorry that he had obtained an education.
There never was an age in the history of the world when it was so true as it is now that “knowledge is power.”
And Knowledge is open to Everybody.
Its gates are unlocked, its door is unlatched, its road is as free as the king’s highway.
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