"I think I have a scheme," I said modestly. Lawson lay back in his chair. "Good! Cough it up, my son!" I smoked hard for a minute. "Well, Lawson, it's like this, my scheme could only be a success if the economic basis of society were altered. So long as one million people take half the national yearly income you can't have any decent scheme of education." "Right O!" said Lawson cheerfully, "for the sake of argument, or rather peace, we'll give you a Utopia where there are no idle rich. Fire away!" "Good! I'll talk about the present day education first. "Twenty years ago education had one aim--to abolish illiteracy. In consequence the Three R.'s were of supreme importance. Nowadays they are held to be quite as important, but a dozen other things have been placed beside them on the pedestal. Gradually education has come to aim at turning out a man or a woman capable of earning a living. Cookery, Woodwork, Typing, Bookkeeping, Shorthand ... all these were introduced so that we should have better wives and joiners and clerks. "Lawson, I would chuck the whole blamed lot out of the elementary school. I don't want children to be trained to make pea-soup and picture frames, I want them to be trained to think. I would cut out History and Geography as subjects." "Eh?" said Lawson. "They'd come in incidentally. For instance, I could teach for a week on the text of a newspaper report of a fire in New York." "The fire would light up the whole world, so to speak," said Lawson with a smile. "Under the present system the teacher never gets under way. He is just getting to the interesting part of his subject when Maggie Brown ups and says, 'Please, sir, it's Cookery now.' The chap who makes a religion of his teaching says 'Damn!' very forcibly, and the girls troop out. "I would keep Composition and Reading and Arithmetic in the curriculum. Drill and Music would come into the play hours, and Sketching would be an outside hobby for warm days." "Where would you bring in the technical subjects?" "Each school would have a workshop where boys could repair their bikes or make kites and arrows, but there would not be any formal instruction in woodwork or engineering. Technical education would begin at the age of sixteen." "Six what?" "Sixteen. You see my pupils are to stay at school till they are twenty. You are providing the cash you know. Well, at sixteen the child would be allowed to select any subject he liked. Suppose he is keen on mechanics. He spends a good part of the day in the engineering shop and the drawing room--mechanical drawing I mean. But the thinking side of his education is still going on. He is studying political economy, eugenics, evolution, philosophy. By the time he is eighteen he has read Nietzsche, Ibsen, Bjornson, Shaw, Galsworthy, Wells, Strindberg, Tolstoi, that is if ideas appeal to him." "Ah!"