“My soul thirsted for an education.”

Chapter Two -The Thirst for Education

 
At dawn on a September day, thirteen-year-old George laid out a square piece of cloth, set on it a neatly folded pair of jeans and shirt, his Webster’s blue-backed speller, a magazine or two and his favorite rocks, tied its corners together, and left home on foot carrying his bundle. Mose and Susan had agreed to let him move to Neosho to go to the colored school there. He would never be able to help with heavy work, and t heir doctor’s prediction of his death before twenty-one meant he didn’t have much time left. They said Jim could go too, but would have to ride back and forth on horseback so he could keep helping them, which he did not choose to do.
George didn’t know where he would stay, but felt he could make it. Maybe one of the merchants he knew in town could refer him to self-supporting work. Mose and Susan would always welcome him back if necessary.

The odyssey that began with that eight-mile walk—an illustrious life including a Master’s degree and three honorary doctorates—has inspired thousands of young people. “Everybody knew,” said a student in Carver’s Young Men’s Bible Class at Tuskegee, “that he had to get his education the hard way, just like us. He put heart into us.”

“Life requires thorough preparation,” Carver said. “There is [no] short cut to achievement… It takes work and study to amount to anything—and time, too. Don’t be in too much of a hurry… Welcoming freshmen to Tuskegee, he said, “Fellow students,” then softly asked them what he had meant by that. “You mean,” a young man said, “that you are still a student.” “Exactly,” he said, and told them he learned new things every day that prepared him to live a useful life… If you wish to be wise,” he told an audience at another black college, “learn some new thing every day… That seems, and… is,… a very small thing;… but if you do this, at the end of the year there would be 365 things… you did not know the year before. All… really worthwhile… knowledge… is built up in this way.”

 
He compared people trying to shortcut education to a bureau back in Mose and Susan’s cabin that he had heard was solid mahogany, but which had begun to blister on its surface. Prying at it, he had found a tissue-thin mahogany veneer coming unglued from plain white pine beneath. This became his symbol for a person superficially educated who, he said, might look pretty well from a distance; but, if you get too close or listen to them talk, you will see “that thin veneer that they are masquerading for education… Be master of things,” he advised, “and not just veneer… Nothing is so damaging as ignorance. I don’t know, you say. What reason is there for you not knowing? You have not looked; you have not searched.”