The principal advantages that a boy or a young man
derives from living in a great city like Lahore’s Karachi or Rawalpindi, or
Quetta, are educational. In country villages there are only elementary schools
and no colleges, whereas in great cities there are numberless schools and
colleges provided with the best teachers in every branch of knowledge. For
instance, in Lahore. A-young man after leaving school may study literature at
F.C. College, Govt. or Science College. If he prefers to study law, he can attend
the Lectures of legal professors or serve his apprenticeship in Law college
office.
If he has a taste for painting or carving or
sculpture, be can obtain instruction at the School of Art. If he wishes to
become a skilled artisan, he joins the Technical Institute. Whatever branch of
study he would like to perfect himself in he finds some educational institution
with its doors open ready to supply his waffles, and, if he shows talent, he is
pretty sure to gain by scholarships enough to defray he cast of his fees.
Besides the advantages of attending schools and colleges, the student in great
cities has access to large libraries, where he can study the best literary and
scientific and philosophical works, and read in the newspapers what is going on
all over the world.
It must also he remembered that education, in the
proper sense of the word, means for more than mere book learning, and that the
educational advantages of great cities are not exhausted when we have mentioned
the knowledge to be acquired in schools, colleges, and libraries. Unfortunately
a large number of Pakistani students bury themselves in their books and take on
interest whatever in the busy life of the great city in which their college is
situated. This is a great mistake. They ought in their leisure hours to examine
with intelligent curiosity. The public buildings, the harbours the ships, and
all the other material products of advanced civilization accessible to them.
Students sacrifice a great part of the advantage that the ought to derive from
their university career, when they thus live in the midst of a great city with
no more knowledge of the outer world than could be obtained by a peasant living
in his native village.
There is a stimulus to metal activity in the life
of large towns, which is lacking in the quiet and slow routine of a village. To
complete with his fellows in a busy city a man must live at high pressure; and
the very rush of the crowded life around him stirs his ambition and incites him
to put forth his best energies. This is why town-dwellers are more enterprising.
Energetic and mentally alert than the slow, plodding rustic, who is apt to
stagnate in the quiet life of the country?
At the same time, while taking part in city life,
country students must be on their guard against the many temptations to which
the inhabitants of cities are exposed. If they yield to these temptations, they
will ruin their health and happiness, and have reason to curse the day they
left their village homes. Otherwise they may expect to enjoy good health and
happiness in crowded cities, if only they take regular exercise every day
during term time, and spend their vacations in the country, where they can
refresh their minds and bodies by breathing purer air than can ever be obtained
for the inhabitants of great cities by the most perfect system of sanitation.