The State school child. Need for the protection of children against parents. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The new Adoption Act. Need for the organization of child life as such. Schools essentially prisons. General ignorance after nine years of enforced elementary schooling. Limits of child liberty. The real nature and purpose of education. Our stupidities about it. Injury done by forcing children to learn things beyond their capacity or foreign to their aptitudes. Girls and compulsory Beethoven. Boys and compulsory classics and mathematics. Eton began by forbidding play and now makes it compulsory. Children as animals to be tamed by beating and sacks to be filled with learning. Opportunities for the Sadist and child fancier. Children in school are outlawed. Typical case of assault. Unendurable strain of the relations between teachers and children. Schools, though educationally disastrous, have the incidental advantage of encouraging promiscuous social intercourse. University manners. Middle class manners. Garden City and Summer School manners. Need for personal privacy and free choice of company not supplied by the snobbery and class segregations of Capitalism. Socialism preferable on this score. Technical education for citizenship. As knowledge must not be withheld on the ground that it is as efficient for evil as for good, it must be accompanied by moral instruction and ethical inculcation. Doctrines a Socialist state could not tolerate. Variety and incompatibility of British religions. Original sin. Brimstone damnation. Children’s souls need protection more than their bodies. The Bible. A common creed necessary to citizenship. Certain prejudices must be inculcated. Need for an official second nature. Limits to State proselytizing. Beyond the irreducible minimum of education the hand should be left to find its own employment and the mind its own food. 412 82 SOCIALISM AND THE CHURCHES