I have described an extreme case, and the judicious reader will realise that the process is rarely completed in so short a time as the last paragraph suggests. But sooner or later most men and women come to believe in experience, and to this belief is due our tyrannous treatment of the young. I can conceive that an age will come that will shrink with horror from the excesses we commit in the name of education, and will regard us who force children to do their lessons against their will very much in the way in which we regard the slave-owners of the past, only with added indignation that our tyranny is imposed on the children’s minds, and not on the bodies of adults. Let those conservative readers who find this comparison a little strained reflect for a moment on what it is that we have to teach the next generation, with what manner of wisdom we chain the children’s imaginations and brand their minds. We teach them in the first place to express themselves in sounds that shall be intelligible to us, and this, I suppose, is necessary, though I should like to doubt it. Further, we invariably instruct them in the sciences of reading and writing, which seems to me frankly unfortunate. In Utopia, as I conceive it, the child who thought there was anything worth reading would teach itself to read, as many children have done before it, and in the same way the rarer child who desired to express itself on paper would teach itself to write. That any useful purpose is served by the general possession of this knowledge I cannot see. Even civilisation cannot rejoice that her children are able to read the Sunday newspapers and scrawl gutter sentiments on the walls of churches. Beyond this we teach children geography, which robs the earth of its charm of unexpectedness and calls beautiful places by ugly names; history, which chronicles inaccurate accounts of unimportant events in the ears of those who would be better employed in discovering the possibilities of their own age; arithmetic, which encourages the human mind to set limits to the infinite; botany, which denotes the purposeless vivisection of flowers; chemistry, which is no more than an indelicate unveiling of matter; and a hundred other so-called arts and science, which, when examined without prejudice, will be found to have for their purpose the standardisation and ultimate belittlement of life.