From Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome (1900) Chapter V:

... what sustained us was the consciousness that we were instructing and improving our fellow men and women. Of all games in the world, the one most universally and eternally popular is the game of school. You collect six children, and put them on a doorstep, while you walk up and down with the book and cane. We play it when babies, we play it when boys and girls, we play it when men and women, we play it as, lean and slippered, we totter towards the grave. It never palls upon, it never wearies us. Only one thing mars it: the tendency of one and all of the other six children to clamour for their turn with the book and the cane. The reason, I am sure, that journalism is so popular a calling, in spite of its many drawbacks, is this: each journalist feels he is the boy walking up and down with the cane. The Government, the Classes, and the Masses, Society, Art, and Literature, are the other children sitting on the doorstep. He instructs and improves them. ...

... as opposed, of course, to working on improving one's self ...

_{(cf Optimist Creed (1999-04-16), Readings on Thinking and Living (2001-10-01), Three Man Boat (2002-01-10), Self Improvement (2002-07-29), My Ob (2002-08-18), Be Your Own Cause (2006-02-04), Meditation by Eknath Easwaran (2010-10-14),...) - ^z - 2020-07-14}