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The University of Hard Knocks

R >> Ralph Parlette >> The University of Hard Knocks



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.



Chapter II

The College of Needless Knocks

The Bumps That We Bump Into


NEARLY all the bumps we get are Needless Knocks.

There comes a vivid memory of one of my early Needless Knocks as I
say that. It was back at the time when I was trying to run our home
to suit myself. I sat in the highest chair in the family circle. I
was three years old and ready to graduate.

That day they had the little joy and sunshine of the family in his
high-chair throne right up beside the dinner table. The coffee-pot
was within grabbing distance.

I became enamored with that coffee-pot. I decided I needed that
coffee-pot in my business. I reached over to get the coffee-pot.
Then I discovered a woman beside me, my mother. She was the most
meddlesome woman I had ever known. I had not tried to do one thing
in three years that that woman had not meddled into.

And that day when I wanted the coffee-pot--I did want it. Nobody
knows
how I desired that coffee-pot. "One thing thou lackest," a
coffee-pot--
I was reaching over to get it, that woman said, "Don't touch that!"

The longer I thought about it the more angry I became. What right
has that woman to meddle into my affairs all the time? I have stood
this petticoat tyranny three years, and it is time to stop it!

I stopped it. I got the coffee-pot. I know I got the coffee-pot. I
got it unanimously. I know when I got it and I also know where I
got it. I got about a gallon of the reddest, hottest coffee a bad
boy ever spilled over himself.

O-o-o-o-o-o! I can feel it yet!

There were weeks after that when I was upholstered. They put
applebutter on me--and coal oil and white-of-an-egg and starch and
anything else the neighbors could think of. They would bring it
over and rub it on the little joy and sunshine of the family, who
had gotten temporarily eclipsed.




Teaching a Wilful Child


You see, my mother's way was to tell me and then let me do as I
pleased. She told me not to get the coffee-pot and then let me get
it, knowing that it would burn me. She would say, "Don't." Then she
would go on with her knitting and let me do as I pleased.

Why don't mothers knit today?

Mother would say, "Don't fall in the well." I could go and jump in
the well after that and she would not look at me. I do not argue
that this is the way to raise children, but I insist that this was
the most kind and effective way to rear one stubborn boy I know of.
The neighbors and the ladies' aid society often said my mother was
cruel with that angel child. But the neighbors did not know what
kind of an insect mother was trying to raise. Mother did know. She
knew how stubborn and self-willed I was. It came from father's
"side of the house."

Mother knew that to argue with me was to flatter me. Tell me, serve
notice upon me, and then let me go ahead and get my coffee-pot.
That was the quickest and kindest way to teach me.

I learned very quickly that if I did not hear mother, and heed, a
coffee-pot would spill upon me. I cannot remember when I disobeyed
my mother that a coffee-pot of some kind did not spill upon me, and I
got my blisters. Mother did not inflict them. Mother was not much of an
inflicter. Father attended to that in the laboratory behind the
parsonage.




"Stop, Look, Listen"


And thru the bumps we learn that The College of Needless Knocks
runs on the same plan. The Voice of Wisdom says to each of us,
"Child of humanity, do right, walk in the right path. You will be
wiser and happier." The tongues in the trees, the books in the
running brooks and the sermons in the stones all repeat it.

But we are not compelled to walk in the right path. We are free
im-moral agents.

We get off the right path. We go down forbidden paths. They seem
easier and more attractive. It is so easy to go downward. We slide
downward, but we have to make effort to go upward.

Anything that goes downward will run itself. Anything that goes
upward has to be pushed.

And going down the wrong path, we get bumped harder and harder
until we listen.

We are lucky if we learn the lesson with one bump. We are unlucky
when we get bumped twice in the same place, for it means we are
making no progress.

When we are bumped, we should "stop, look, listen." "Safety first!"

One time I paid a seeress two dollars to look into my honest palm.
She said, "It hain't your fault. You wasn't born right. You was
born under an unlucky star." You don't know how that comforted me.
It wasn't my fault--all my bumps and coffee-pots! I was just
unlucky and it had to be.

How I had to be bumped to learn better! Now when I get bumped I try
to learn the lesson of the bump and find the right path, so that
when I see that bump coming again I can say, "Excuse me; it hath a
familiar look," and dodge it.

The seeress is the soothing syrup for mental infants.




Blind Man's Fine Sight


The other day I watched a blind man go down the aisle of the car to
get off the train. Did you ever study the walk of a blind man? He
"pussyfooted" it along so carefully. He bumped his hand against a
seat. Then he did what every blind man does, he lifted his hand
higher and didn't bump any more seats.

I looked down my nose. "Ralph Parlette," I said to myself, "when
are you going to learn to see as well as that blind man? He learns
his lesson with one bump, and you have to go bumping into the same
things day after day and wonder why you have so much `bad luck'!"




Are You Going Up or Down?


Let me repeat, things that go downward will run themselves. Things
that go upward have to be pushed. Going upward is overcoming.
Notice that churches, schools, lyceums, chautauquas, reform
movements--things that go upward--never run themselves. They must
be pushed all the time.

And so with our own lives. Real living is conscious effort to go
upward to larger life.

If you are making no effort in your life, if you are moving in the
line of least resistance, depend upon it you are going downward.
Look out for the bumps!

Look over your community. Note the handful of brave, faithful,
unselfish souls who are carrying the community burdens and pushing
upward. Note the multitude making little or no effort, and even
getting in the way of the pushers.

Majorities do not rule. Majorities never have ruled. It is the
brave minority of thinking, self-sacrificing people that decides
the tomorrow of communities that go upward. Majorities are not
willing to make the effort to rule themselves. They are content to
drift and be amused and follow false gods that promise something
for nothing. They must be led--sometimes driven--by minorities.

People are like sheep. The shepherd can lead them to heaven--or to
hell.




Bumping the Prodigals


Human life is the story of the Prodigal Son. We look over the fence
of goodness into the mystery of the great unknown world beyond and
in that unknown realm we fondly imagine is happiness.

Down the great white way of the world go the million prodigals,
seeking happiness where nobody ever found happiness. Their days
fill up with disappointment, their vision becomes dulled. They
become anaemic feeding upon the husks.

They just must get their coffee-pot!

How they must be bumped to think upon their ways. Every time we do
wrong we get a Needless Knock. Every time! We may not always get
bumped on the outside, but we always get bumped on the inside. A
bump on the conscience is worse than a bump on the "noodle."

"I can do wrong and not get bumped. I have no feelings upon the
subject," somebody says, You can? You poor old sinner, you have
bumped your conscience numb. That is why you have no feelings on
the subject. You have pounded your soul into a jelly. You don't
know how badly you are hurt.

How the old devil works day and night to keep people amused and
doped
so that they will not think upon their ways! How he keeps the music
and the dazzle going so they will not see they are bumping
themselves!




Consider the Sticky Flypaper


Did you ever watch a fly get his Needless Knocks on the sticky
flypaper?

The last thing Mamma Fly said as Johnny went off to the city was,
"Remember, son, to stay away from the sticky flypaper. That is
where your poor dear father was lost." And Johnny Fly remembers for
several minutes. But when he sees all the smart young flies of his
set go over to the flypaper, he goes over, too. He gazes down at
his face in the stickiness. "Ah! how pretty I am! This sticky
flypaper shows me up better than anything at home. What a fine
place to skate. Just see how close I can fly over it and not get
stuck a bit. Mother is such a silly old worryer. She means all
right, of course, but she isn't up-to-date. We young set of modern
flies are naturally bright and have so many more advantages. You
can't catch us. They were too strict with me back home."

You see Johnny fly back and forth and have the time of his
naturally bright young life. Afterwhile, tho, he stubs his toe and
lands in the stickiness. "Well, well, how nice this is on the feet,
so soft and soothing!"

First he puts one foot down and pulls it out. That is a lot of fun.
It shows he is not a prisoner. He is a strong-minded fly. He can
quit it or play in it, just as he pleases. After while he puts two
feet down in the stickiness. It is harder to pull them out. Then he
puts three down and puts down a few more trying to pull them out.

"Really," says Johnny Fly bowing to his comrades also stuck around
him, "really, boys, you'll have to excuse me now. Good-bye!" But he
doesn't pull loose. He feels tired and he sits down in the sticky
flypaper. It is a fine place to stick around. All his young set of
flies are around him. He does like the company. They all feel the
same way--they can play in the sticky flypaper or let it alone,
just as they please, for they are strong-minded flies. They have
another drink and sing, "We won't go home till morning."

Johnny may get home, but he will leave a wing or a leg.
Most of them stay. They just settle down into the stickiness
with sleeping sickness.

The tuition in The College of Needless Knocks is very high indeed!




"Removed" or "Knocked Out"?


The man who goes to jail ought to congratulate himself if he is
guilty. It is the man who does not get discovered who is to be
pitied, for he must get some more knocks.

The world loves to write resolutions of respect. How often we
write, "Whereas, it has pleased an all-wise Providence to remove,"
when we might reasonably ask whether the victim was "removed" or
merely "knocked out."

There is a good deal of suicide charged up to Providence.



Chapter III

The College of Needful Knocks

The Bumps That Bump Into Us


BUT occasionally all of us get bumps that we do not bump into. They
bump into us. They are the guideboard knocks that point us to the
higher pathway.

You were bumped yesterday or years ago. Maybe the wound has not yet
healed. Maybe you think it never will heal. You wondered why you
were bumped. Some of you in this audience are just now wondering
why.

You were doing right--doing just the best you knew how--and yet
some blow came crushing upon you and gave you cruel pain.

It broke your heart. You have had your heart broken. I have had my
heart broken more times than I care to talk about now. Your home
was darkened, your plans were wrecked, you thought you had nothing
more to live for.

I am like you. I have had more trouble than anybody else. I have
never known anyone who had not had more trouble than anyone else.

But I am discovering that life only gets good after we have been
killed a few times. Each death is a larger birth.

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