battling ignorance

"At times like this, when Miss Thornton was very tired, she felt that she fought a losing battle with ignorance and was overcome with a sense of futility and helplessness. What sense was there in nagging a boy into memorizing the dates of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire when the boy, grown, would milk cows for a living, as had his father and grandfather before him. What logic was there in pounding decimal fractions into the head of a girl who would eventually need to count only to number the months of each pregnancy? ... But in her mind then, as now, was the hope which kept her at her job, just as it has kept teachers working for hundreds of years. If I can teach something to one child, if I can awaken in only one child a sense of beauty, a joy in truth, an admission of ignorance and a thirst for knowledge, then I am fulfilled."
--Peyton Place, Grace Metalious