It is a period of seeing visions and of dreaming dreams; you know that, if you remember your boyhood and girlhood.  Those dreams and visions are the most substantial things there are in his life or in yours or mine; for “where there is no vision the people perish.”  Wendell Phillips used to say that “the power which overthrew slavery and hurled it to the ground was young men and young women dreaming dreams by patriots’ graves.”  There is a good deal more than rhetoric in that statement.  Endless possibilities are in these dreams and visions.  It is a period of promise, of magnificent promise, which you and I as teachers are privileged to see afar off before they are even glimpsed by his parents and many of his friends.

The great question now is, Will the promise and the vision ever be realized, or will they fade out and disappear and leave him a Philistine?  And lucky if he is not a brute, for the only brute in this world, my friends, is a degenerate man.  When you hear a man say that he has cut his eye-teeth, and he has got rid of his dreams and his visions, then may the Lord have mercy on the soul of that man, because he is dead.  The all-important question now is, Can you get that dream and that vision so burned into his memory, so blazing before his eyes, that he will never forget it and never lose sight of it, and win it if it costs him his life?  Then you have educated him.

These visions are far more important than all of the science, even the biology, that a man can learn in college.  It is the business of the parent and teacher at this time to bring to birth and to sturdy growth high aims, purposes, ideals, the whole spiritual life.  Your business in early childhood is with the physical, because that is the important thing at that time, if you can build a very healthy little animal, you have done well; but during the high school age you must build the spiritual.  If you don’t feel this, I cannot explain it to you; and if you don’t feel this within you, if it is all meaningless and mere noise, don’t you dare teach a high school, for you are not big enough nor deep enough to do that.

The great question, after all, is not how much learning have you been able to put into him, but how much of the finer ambitions, how much power, how deeply and strongly they hunger for the very best.  An ounce of inspiration at this time is worth more than a pound or a ton of learning; I am no foe of learning, either.  The high school is and will remain the people’s college.  It is the only college that a great part of the people ever will know.  Do not neglect that great fraction who are never going to get anything higher and beyond in order to put your time on those who are going on to colleges and universities.  You must be the people’s support, and you may well thank fortune that it doesn’t seem to be nine-tenths of your business out here in the West to fit boys and girls for a college examination.  If that ever threatens to become your business, then you withstand it and face it to the death, for there is nothing will ruin education faster than that; I know sorrowfully whereof I speak.