The Educational Institute of Scotland, like the Trade Unions, is very humble in its demands. Why, in the name of heaven, ask for larger areas? Mr. Tennant rightly replied that it was news to him that the County Council is a more progressive body than the small School Board. Introduce larger areas and your village pig-dealer and shoemaker give place to your county colonel and manufacturer ... the men who are interested in the maintenance of discipline and of wage-slavery. What the Institute should really do is to give up thinking and talking of education for this generation. The leading members come from our large city schools, and if they haven't yet realised that their damned schools are factories for turning out slaves they ought to be jolly well ashamed of themselves. I visited a large city school a few days ago. It had nine hundred pupils, and it was four stories high. The playground was a small concrete corner; the discipline was like prison discipline; the rooms were dingy soul-destroying cages. How dare the teachers of Scotland ask that the school age be raised to fifteen when our city schools are barracks like that? I would have the age lowered to six if these prisons are to continue. One of the delegates, Mr. Cowan, showed that he was looking at education in a broad light. "Education," he said, "if it is to be real, is bound up with the questions of housing, public health, medical treatment, and the like; ... hence education should be in the hands of some body that would view the matter as a whole ... viz., the County Council." He might have added that education is primarily bound up with profiteering. Our city schools are necessarily adjuncts to our factories and our slums; the dominie is clearly the servant of the capitalist ... and the poor devil doesn't know it. It's absolutely useless to talk of larger areas and larger salaries and larger children; the fundamental fact is that capital calls the tune, and larger areas will do as much for education as tinkering with the saddle spring of a motor-bike will do for a seized engine bearing. Larger salaries will attract better men and women to the profession, says the Institute representative, and I ask wearily: "What difference will that make? You'll merely get honours graduates to do the profiteer's dirty work more effectively. You can't reform the schools from within. The prisons are built, and you will merely tempt your highly specialised teacher into a soul-destroying hell. The slums and the sweating will go on as usual next door; your city children will be starved and ragged and diseased as of yore."