I don't think that this is Kipling either. I have found several references on the internet that it is from a poem by Arthur Guiterman (1871-1943) titled "Education". This runs as follows:

 

Mark Hopkins sat on one end of a log
And a farm boy sat on the other.
Mark Hopkins came as a pedagogue
And taught as an elder brother.
I don’t care what Mark Hopkins taught,
If his Latin was small and his Greek was naught,
For the farm boy he thought, thought he,
All through the lecture time and quiz,
“The kind of a man I mean to be
Is the kind of a man Mark Hopkins is.”

 

Theology, languages, medicine, law,
Are peacock feathers to deck a daw
If the boys who come from your splendid schools
Are well-trained sharpers or flippant fools,
You may boast of your age and your ivied walls,
Your great endowments, your marble halls,
And all your modern features,
Your vast curriculum’s scope and reach
And the multifarious things you teach—
But how about your teachers?
Are they men who can stand in a father’s place,
Who are paid, best paid, by the ardent face
When boyhood gives, as boyhood can,
Its love and faith to a fine, true man?

 

No printed word nor spoken plea
Can teach young hearts what men should be,
Not all the books on all the shelves,
But what the teachers are, themselves.
For Education is, Making Men;
So is it now, so was it when
Mark Hopkins sat on one end of a log
And James Garfield sat on the other.

 

Yours,

 

David Page

----- Original Message ----
From: John Radcliffe <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, 31 January, 2008 4:06:54 PM
Subject: Fw: quotation