The Price of Learning

Because of their love for us, or because of the spirit of sincere service, parents, and others also, do many things for us⎯and so often, so many of us find ourselves so much on the receiving side. There is scarcely a parent worthy the name who wouldn’t do anything he could in honor do to help his child acquire the essentials for a full and effective life.
But this we must remember, as parents and as children, as teachers and as students, and is all the relationships of life: There are some things you can give another person, and some things you cannot give him, except as he is willing to reach out and take them, and pay the price of making them a part of himself. This principle applies to studying, to developing talents, to absorbing knowledge, to acquiring skills, and to the learning of all the lessons of life.
When a student is faced with an examination for which he poorly prepared (when he is cramming and trying to take in overnight the knowledge he should long before have absorbed in small doses), perhaps most parents, with their soft and sympathetic hearts, would, if it were possible, literally learn their children’s lessons for them⎯English and algebra and calculus and chemistry, and all else, including some of the more sobering lessons of life⎯if they could. But there are some things we cannot learn for anyone else; there are some things we cannot do for anyone else.
We can encourage; we can teach; we can hire others to teach; we can pay the tuition; we can provide the tools and the texts, the instruments and opportunities, but he who learns must be willing to pay the price, in work, in study, in the pain of practice, in earnestness of effort. (The Lord God himself cannot⎯or will not⎯make of us something we are not willing to pay the price of becoming.)
The effort of doing, of serving, of absorbing, of assimilating, is an inescapable part of the price we pay for acquiring within ourselves the good things that are offered. Help is always most effective when it comes in collaboration with our own efforts.
We call on Emerson to summarize the subject for us in this simple sentence: “Do the thing⎯and you shall have the power, but they who do not the thing have not the power.”
Neither parents, nor teachers, nor anyone else, can make of any of us what we are not willing to become, what we are not willing to work at. The principle of participation is one of the great and saving principles of life, both as to things pertaining to time, and to eternity, “Do the thing⎯and you shall have the power, but they who do not the thing have not the power.”