I want education to guide a child into finding out what best it can do. At present our schools provide for the average child ... and heaven only knows how many geniuses have been destroyed by stupid coercion. I want education to set out deliberately to catch genius in the bud. And what discovers genius cannot be bad for the children who have no genius. I want education to produce the best that is in a child. That is the only way to improve the world. The naked truth is that we grown-ups have failed to make the world better than the gigantic slum it is, and when we pretend to know how a child should be brought up we are being merely fatuous. We must hand on what we have learned to the children, but we must do it without comment. We must not say: "This is right," because we don't know what is right: we must not say: "This is wrong," because we don't know what is wrong. The most we should do is to tell a child our experience. When I caught my boys smoking I did not say: "This is wrong"; I merely said: "Doctors say that cigarettes are bad for a boy's health. They are the specialists in health; you and I don't know anything about it." When I tell a boy that a light should not be taken near to petrol I am handing on bitter experience of my own, but when I say that he must know the chief dates of history by Monday morning I am doing an absolutely defenceless thing, for no one can prove by experience that a knowledge of dates is a good thing. Macdonald would say: "Quite so, but could you prove that it is a bad thing?" I would reply that I could prove it is a senseless thing; moreover education should not aim at giving children things that do not do them harm. I don't suppose that it would do me any harm to learn up the proper names in the Bible beginning with Adam. The point is would it do me any good? I once had a discussion with Macdonald on Socialism. He accused me of attempting to force humanity to be of a pattern. "Socialism kills individualism," he said. I smile to think that the Conservative Macdonald is trying to mould children to a pattern, while I, a Socialist, insist on each child's being allowed to develop its own separate individuality. The Socialist would appear to be the keenest individualist in the world, for it is from the heretical section of society that the demand for freedom in education is coming. * * * To-day I visited Watterson, an old college friend of mine. He is now in Harley Street, and is fast becoming famous as a specialist in nervous disorders. "Your nerves are all to pot," he said; "what have you been doing with yourself?" I told him my recent history. "But, Good Lord!" he cried, "how did you manage to find any worry in a village?"