We Are Teaching Our Children Laziness!

This is what the writer says: My son is nearly my height, and I swear I never see him do a single piece of work outside his studies. The ones to blame are his mother and I, for we make everything easy for him and plant in his mind the idea that work is something unbecoming to the likes of him. I do not recall that I was like him in my early youth, or that I ever heard what he hears. My father was forever pelting me with advice — to serious work! — that is what he used to say, and he would make me work in the orchard until I felt my strength give out. And if I dared to raise my head and tell him that I had a right to play and share in my companions' merriment, he would deliver me a lecture on the bodily and spiritual benefits of work: hard work does no harm!

How mistaken my father's idea was! Exhausting work does harm to the millions who struggle all their lives so that they may rest when not an ember of life remains in their being. Is that the virtue of work? If our view is correct, our boy will never come to such a pass! I expect him to hate toil and flee from it, to find some invention that makes the work easier for him, or to leave it and go off in another direction — for man was not put on this earth merely to suffer!...

Thomas Edison is given as an example of the struggling man who spent his life in the fight, whose delight in work was matched by nothing else in life. Success would send a delicious thrill through his soul, driving him ever onward to search out new discoveries. One day he was in the midst of a new attempt, and in his absorption he forgot himself and neither ate nor slept. Had Edison been content with the work already in his hands, we would still be lighting our way today with kerosene lamps.

I hope my boy will not suffer, and that when he grows up he will do whatever work pleases him, so that in the twenty hours he bends over his work he will be enjoying himself — and all this will come about naturally, sparing him misery and fatigue!