The University of Hard Knocks
by
Ralph Parlette
The School That Completes Our Education
"He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God,
and he shall be my son"--Revelation 21:7.
"Sweet are the uses of adversity;
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And thus our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
Shakespeare
Why It Is Printed
MORE than a million people have sat in audiences in all parts of the
United States and have listened to "The University of Hard Knocks." It
has been delivered to date more than twenty-five hundred times upon
lyceum courses, at chautauquas, teachers' institutes, club gatherings,
conventions and before various other kinds of audiences. Ralph Parlette
is kept busy year after year lecturing, because his lectures deal with
universal human experience.
"Can I get the lecture in book form?" That continuous question from
audiences brought out this book in response. Here is the overflow of
many deliveries.
"What is written here is not the way I would write it, were I writing a
book," says Ralph Parlette. "It is the way I say it. The lecture took
this unconscious colloquial form before audiences. An audience makes a
lecture, if the lecture survives. I wish I could shake the hand of
every person who has sat in my audiences. And I wish I could tell the
lecture committees of America how I appreciate the vast amount of
altruistic work they have done in bringing the audiences of America
together. For lecture audiences are not drawn together, they are pushed
together."
The warm reception given "The University of Hard Knocks" by the public,
has encouraged the publishers to put more of Mr. Parlette's lectures
into book form, "Big Business" and "Pockets and Paradises" are now in
preparation as this, the third edition of "The University of Hard
Knocks" comes from the press.
Contents
SOME PRELIMINARY REMARKS--The lecturer the delivery wagon--The sorghum
barrel--Audience must have place to put lecture--Why so many words
The University of Hard Knocks
I. THE BOOKS ARE BUMPS--Every bump a lesson--Why the two kinds of
bumps--Description of University--"Sweet are the uses of
Adversity"--Why children are not interested
II. THE COLLEGE OF NEEDLESS KNOCKS, the bumps that we bump
into--Getting the coffee-pot--Teaching a wilful child--Bumps make us
"stop, look, listen"--Blind man learns with one bump--Going up requires
effort--Prodigals must be bumped--The fly and the sticky
fly-paper--"Removed" and "knocked out"
III. THE COLLEGE OF NEEDFUL KNOCKS, the bumps that bump into us--Our
sorrows and disappointments--How the piano was made--How the "red mud"
becomes razor-blades--The world our mirror--The cripple taught by the
bumps--Every bump brings a blessing--You are never down and out
IV. "SHAKE THE BARREL"--How we decide our destinies--Why the big ones
shake up and the little ones shake down--The barrel of life sorting
people--How we hold our places, go down, go up--Good luck and bad
luck--The girl who went up--The man who went down--The fatal rattle--We
must get ready to get--Testimonials and press notices--You cannot
uplift people with derrick--No laws can equalize--Help people to help
themselves--We cannot get things till we get ready for them
V. GOING UP--How we become great--We must get inside greatness--There
is no top--We make ourselves great by service--the first step at
hand--All can be greatest--Where to find great people--A glimpse of
Gunsaulus
VI. THE PROBLEM OF "PREPAREDNESS"--Preparing children for life--Most
"advantages" are disadvantages--Buying education for children--The
story of "Gussie" and "Bill Whackem"--Schools and books only give
better tools for service--"Hard knocks" graduates--Menace of America
not swollen fortunes but shrunken souls--Children must have struggle to
get strength--Not packhorse work--Helping the turkeys killed them--the
happiness of work we love--Amusement drunkards--Lure of the
city--Strong men from the country--Must save the home towns--A school
of struggle--New School experiment
VII. THE SALVATION OF A "SUCKER"--You can't get something for
nothing--The fiddle and the tuning--How we know things--Trimmed at the
shell game--My "fool drawer"--Getting "selected to receive 1,000 per
cent"--You must earn what you own--Commencement orations--My maiden
sermon--The books that live have been lived--Singer must live
songs--Successful songs written from experience--Theory and
practice--Tuning the strings of life
VIII. LOOKING BACKWARD--Memories of the price we pay--My first school
teaching--Loaning the deacon my money--Calling the roll of my
schoolmates--At the grave of the boy I had envied--Why Ben Hur won the
chariot race--Pulling on the oar
IX. GO ON SOUTH!--The book in the running brook--The Mississippi keeps
on going south and growing greater--We generally start well, but
stop--Few go on south--The plague of incompetents--Today our best day,
tomorrow to be better--Birthdays are promotions--I am just
beginning--Bernhardt, Davis, Edison--Moses begins at eighty--Too busy
to bury--Sympathy for the "sob squad"--Child sees worst days, not
best--Waiting for the second table--Better days on south--Overcoming
obstacles develops power--Go on south from principle, not praise--Doing
duty for the joy of it--Becoming the "Father of Waters"--Go on south
forever!
X. GOING UP LIFE'S MOUNTAIN--The defeats that are victories--Climbing
Mount Lowe--Getting above the clouds into the sunshine--Each day we
rise to larger vision--Getting above the night into the eternal
day--Going south is going upward
Some Preliminary Remarks
LADIES and Gentlemen:
I do not want to be seen in this lecture. I want to be heard. I am only
the delivery wagon. When the delivery wagon comes to your house, you
are not much interested in how it looks; you are interested in the
goods it brings you. You know some very good goods are sometimes
delivered to you in some very poor delivery wagons.
So in this lecture, please do not pay any attention to the delivery
wagon--how much it squeaks and wheezes and rattles and wabbles. Do not
pay much attention to the wrappings and strings. Get inside to the
goods.
Really, I believe the goods are good. I believe I am to recite to you
some of the multiplication table of life--not mine, not yours alone,
but everybody's.
Can Only Pull the Plug!
Every audience has a different temperature, and that makes a lecture go
differently before every audience. The kind of an audience is just as
important as the kind of a lecture. A cold audience will make a good
lecture poor, while a warm audience will make a poor lecture good.
Let me illustrate:
When I was a boy we had a barrel of sorghum in the woodshed. When
mother wanted to make ginger-bread or cookies, she would send me to the
woodshed to get a bucket of sorghum from that barrel.
Some warm September day I would pull the plug from the barrel and the
sorghum would fairly squirt into my bucket. Later in the fall when it
was colder, I would pull the plug but the sorghum would not squirt. It
would come out slowly and reluctantly, so that I would have to wait a
long while to get a little sorghum. And on some real cold winter day I
would pull the plug, but the sorghum would not run at all. It would
just look out at me.
I discovered it was the temperature.
I have brought a barrel of sorghum to this audience. The name of the
sorghum is "The University of Hard Knocks." I can only pull the plug. I
cannot make it run. That will depend upon the temperature of this
audience. You can have all you want of it, but to get it to running
freely, you will have to warm up.
Did You Bring a Bucket?
No matter how the sorghum runs, you have to have a bucket to get it.
How much any one gets out of a lecture depends also upon the size of
the bucket he brings to get it in. A big bucket can get filled at a
very small stream. A little bucket gets little at the greatest stream.
With no bucket you can get nothing at Niagara.
That often explains why one person says a lecture is great, while the
next person says he got nothing out of it.
What It's All About
Here is a great mass of words and sentences and pictures to express two
or three simple little ideas of life, that our education is our growing
up from the Finite to the Infinite, and that it is done by our own
personal overcoming, and that we never finish it.
Have you noticed that no sentence, nor a million sentences, can bound
life? Have you noticed that every statement does not quite cover it? No
statement, no library, can tell all about life. No success rule can
alone solve the problem. You must average it all and struggle up to a
higher vision.
We are told that the stomach needs bulk as well as nutriment. It would
not prosper with the necessary elements in their condensed form. So
abstract truths in their lowest terms do not always promote mental
digestion like more bulk in the way of pictures and discussions of
these truths. Here is bulk as well as nutriment.
If you get the feeling that the first personal pronoun is being
overworked, I remind you that this is more a confession than a lecture.
You cannot confess without referring to the confesser.
To Everybody in My Audience
I like you because I am like you.
I believe in you because I believe in myself. We are all one family. I
believe in your Inside, not in your Outside, whoever you are, whatever
you are, wherever you are.
I believe in the Angel of Good inside every block of human marble. I
believe it must be carved out in The University of Hard Knocks.
I believe all this pride, vanity, selfishness, self-righteousness,
hypocrisy and human frailty are the Outside that must be chipped away.
I believe the Hard Knocks cannot injure the Angel, but can only reveal
it.
I hope you are getting your Hard Knocks.
I care little about your glorious or inglorious past. I care little
about your present. I care much about your future for that is to see
more of the Angel in you.
The University of Hard Knocks
Chapter I
The Books Are Bumps
THE greatest school is the University of Hard Knocks. Its books are
bumps.
Every bump is a lesson. If we learn the lesson with one bump, we do not
get that bump again. We do not need it. We have traveled past it. They
do not waste the bumps. We get promoted to the next bump.
But if we are "naturally bright," or there is something else the matter
with us, so that we do not learn the lesson of the bump we have just
gotten, then that bump must come back and bump us again.
Some of us learn to go forward with a few bumps, but most of us are
"naturally bright" and have to be pulverized.
The tuition in the University of Hard Knocks is not free. Experience is
the dearest teacher in the world. Most of us spend our lives in the
A-B-C's of getting started.
We matriculate in the cradle.
We never graduate. When we stop learning we are due for another bump.
There are two kinds of people--wise people and fools. The fools are the
people who think they have graduated.
The playground is all of God's universe.
The university colors are black and blue.
The yell is "ouch" repeated ad lib.
The Need of the Bumps
When I was thirteen I knew a great deal more than I do now. There was a
sentence in my grammar that disgusted me. It was by some foreigner I
had never met. His name was Shakespeare. It was this:
"Sweet are the uses of adversity; Which, like the toad, ugly and
venomous, Wears yet a priceless jewel in its head; And thus our life,
exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in running
brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
"Tongues in trees," I thought. "Trees can't talk! That man is crazy.
Books in running brooks! Why nobody never puts no books in no running
brooks. They'd get wet. And that sermons in stones! They get preachers
to preach sermons, and they build houses out of stones."
I was sorry for Shakespeare--when I was thirteen.
But I am happy today that I have traveled a little farther. I am happy
that I have begun to learn the lessons from the bumps. I am happy that
I am learning the sweet tho painful lessons of the University of
Adversity. I am happy that I am beginning to listen. For as I learn to
listen, I hear every tree speaking, every stone preaching and every
running brook the unfolding of a book.
Children, I fear you will not be greatly interested in what is to
follow. Perhaps you are "naturally bright" and feel sorry for
Shakespeare.
I was not interested when father and mother told me these things. I
knew they meant all right, but the world had moved since they were
young, and now two and two made seven, because we lived so much faster.
It is so hard to tell young people anything. They know better. So they
have to get bumped just where we got bumped, to learn that two and two
always makes four, and "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap."
But if you will remember some of these things, they will feel like
poultices by and by when the bumps come.
The Two Colleges
As we get bumped and battered on life's pathway, we discover we get two
kinds of bumps--bumps that we need and bumps that we do not need.
Bumps that we bump into and bumps that bump into us.
We discover, in other words, that The University of Hard Knocks has two
colleges--The College of Needless Knocks and The College of Needful
Knocks.
We attend both colleges.