"Of course, I don't say that one man in a hundred will read Ibsen. You will always have the majority who are averse to thinking if they can get out of it. These will be good mechanics and typists and joiners in many cases. My point is that every boy or girl has the chance to absorb ideas during their teens." "Would you make it compulsory? For instance, that boy Willie Smith in your school; do you think that he would learn much more if he had to stay at school till he was twenty?" "No," I said, "I wouldn't force anyone to stay at school, but to-day boys quite as stupid naturally as Smith stay at the university and love it. A few years' rubbing shoulders with other men is bound to make a man more alert. Take away, as you have done for argument's sake, the necessity of a boy's leaving school at fourteen to earn a living and you simply make every school a university." "And it isn't three weeks since I heard you curse universities!" said Lawson with a grin. "I'm thinking of the social side of a university," I explained. "That is good. The educational side of our universities is bad because it is mostly cram. I crammed Botany and Zoo for my degree and I know nothing about either; I was too busy trying to remember words like Caryophylacia, or whatever it is, to ask why flowers droop their heads at night. So in English I had to cram up what Hazlitt and Coleridge said about Shakespeare when I should have been reading _Othello_. The university fails because it refuses to connect education with contemporary life. You go there and you learn a lot of rot about syllogisms and pentameters, and nothing is done to explain to you the meaning of the life in the streets outside. No wonder that Oxford and Cambridge dons write to the papers saying that life has no opening for a university man." "But I thought that you didn't want education to produce a practical man. You wanted a theoretical chimney-sweep, didn't you?" said Lawson smiling. "The present university turns out men who are neither practical nor theoretical. I want a university that will turn out thinkers. The men who have done most to stimulate thought these past few years are men like Wells and Shaw and Chesterton; and I don't think that one of them is a 'varsity man.'" "You can't run a world on thought," said he. "I don't know," I said, "we seem to run this old State of ours _without_ thought. The truth is that there will always be more workers than thinkers. While one chap is planning a new heaven on earth, the other ninety-nine are working hard at motors and benches. "H. G. Wells is always asking for better technical schools, more research, more invention. All these are absolutely necessary, but I want more than that; along with science and art I want the thinking part of education to go on." "It goes on now."