From the American Motherhood Series - No. 9: Moral Education Through Work
We have seen that work as well as play is present in all human living, that the motive of love must be completed by duty; 
therefore, if moral education is to prepare for life it must train both the desire for earnest work and the habit of its performance.
Moreover, not only as a preparation for adult life, but in its direct moral results, work is a precious instrument of education. It can be made to contribute in four ways:
1. The power to work is the mastery of the means indispensable in the pursuit of any end of human life. Spontaneous action is an end in itself as work is not, but we do not go far on the path toward any aim that is worth while without the power of hard, sustained effort. Genius has been defined as the capacity for hard work; genius is much more than that, but no talent or gift will carry a man far without the ability to work earnestly and continuously even when the work is distasteful.
2. While play is the form of action most rapidly developing power, it is through work that we round out character and bring elements in which we are deficient into harmony with the whole, thus making our lives more effective instruments than they could be otherwise.
3. Work is the means by which we establish good habits we would not otherwise form. In so far as our desires are right 
and our play-instincts sound, we can leave the habits formed by spontaneous action to take care of themselves; but it is only by hard and repeated effort that we can build brain-paths to actions and ends we know to be right but to
which we are not naturally drawn in desire. Yet it is just these habits formed by hard, conscious effort that are the one trustworthy safeguard against the forms of failure to which we are individually peculiarly liable.
4. It is work that gives us self-mastery in every phase of the moral life. Play is expressive, harmonious, beautiful, but hard effort is the one path to a self-control, positive not negative, that makes it possible for us to trust ourselves and utilize all our forces for the ends we consider worth while.
Excerpt Taken From:
Griggs, Edward Howard. No. 9: Moral Education Through Work. Cooperstown, NY: Crist, Scott, & Parshall, 1907.
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