the spiritual and mental side of American supremacy

The next, under the wistful appeal “Finger Print Detectives Wanted — Big Incomes!” confided: “YOU red-blooded men and women — this is the PROFESSION you have been looking for. There’s MONEY in it, BIG money, and that rapid change of scene, that entrancing and compelling interest and fascination, which your active mind and adventurous spirit crave. Think of being the chief figure and directing factor in solving strange mysteries and baffling crimes. This wonderful profession brings you into contact with influential men on the basis of equality, and often calls upon you to travel everywhere, maybe to distant lands — all expenses paid. NO SPECIAL EDUCATION REQUIRED.Well, I don’t think much of that. Doggone likely to get hurt. Still, that music-study stunt might be pretty fair, though. There’s no reason why, if efficiency-experts put their minds to it the way they have to routing products in a factory, they couldn’t figure out some scheme so a person wouldn’t have to monkey with all this practising and exercises that you get in music.” Babbitt was impressed, and he had a delightful parental feeling that they two, the men of the family, understood each other.
He listened to the notices of mail-box universities which taught Short-story Writing and Improving the Memory, Motion-picture-acting and Developing the Soul-power, Banking and Spanish, Chiropody and Photography, Electrical Engineering and Window-trimming, Poultry-raising and Chemistry.I’m a son of a gun! I knew this correspondence-school business had become a mighty profitable game — makes suburban real-estate look like two cents!— but I didn’t realize it’d got to be such a reg’lar key-industry! Must rank right up with groceries and movies. Always figured somebody’d come along with the brains to not leave education to a lot of bookworms and impractical theorists but make a big thing out of it. Yes, I can see how a lot of these courses might interest you. I must ask the fellows at the Athletic if they ever realized — But same time, Ted, you know how advertisers, I means some advertisers, exaggerate. I don’t know as they’d be able to jam you through these courses as fast as they claim they can.I can see what an influence these courses might have on the whole educational works. Course I’d never admit it publicly — fellow like myself, a State U. graduate, it’s only decent and patriotic for him to blow his horn and boost the Alma Mater — but smatter of fact, there’s a whole lot of valuable time lost even at the U., studying poetry and French and subjects that never brought in anybody a cent. I don’t know but what maybe these correspondence-courses might prove to be one of the most important American inventions. Trouble with a lot of folks is: they’re so blame material; they don’t see the spiritual and mental side of American supremacy; they think that inventions like the telephone and the areoplane and wireless — no, that was a Wop invention, but anyway: they think these mechanical improvements are all that we stand for; whereas to a real thinker, he sees that spiritual and, uh, dominating movements like Efficiency, and Rotarianism, and Prohibition, and Democracy are what compose our deepest and truest wealth. And maybe this new principle in education-at-home may be another — may be another factor.