Ruskin has said that the children of the rich often get the worst
education to be had for money, whereas the children of the poor often
get the best education for nothing. And the poor man's school is
hardship. {8}
It is generally admitted that wealthy American parents are too
indulgent towards their children. However this may be, many an
American father is determined that his sons shall not go through what
he himself went through as a boy, forgetting that the hardships of his
youth were largely the hardships of pioneer life which have vanished
forever. No boy with good stuff in him and with a fair education
unmixed with extravagant habits of living can possibly have more
hardship nowadays than is good for him. Every young man must sooner
or later stand by himself; and hardship, which in its essence is to be
thrown on one's own resources, is the best school.
But the most alluring school of hardship, a sort of Summer School of
the University of Hard Knocks, is a walking trip into the mountains to
the regions of summer snow, carrying one's whole outfit on one's back
as did the Kansas boys of '89, or indulging in the ownership of a
pack-pony and a miner's tent as did D. and the writer in '95. The
hardships of such a trip are of the old old type, the facing of all
kinds of weather and the hunting for food, and they waken a thousand-fold
deeper response than the most serious hunt for a job in a modern city.