my selfishness exceed reasonable limits.

Money is at the bottom of all this to a great extent. If the parents
would put their children in the way of earning a competence earlier than
they do, the children would soon become self-supporting and independent.
As it is, under the present system, the young ones get old enough to have
all manner of legitimate wants (that is, if they have any "go" about
them) before they have learnt the means of earning money to pay for them;
hence they must either do without them, or take more money than the
parents can be expected to spare. This is due chiefly to the schools of
Unreason, where a boy is taught upon hypothetical principles, as I will
explain hereafter; spending years in being incapacitated for doing this,
that, or the other (he hardly knows what), during all which time he ought
to have been actually doing the thing itself, beginning at the lowest
grades, picking it up through actual practice, and rising according to
the energy which is in him.

These schools of Unreason surprised me much. It would be easy to fall
into pseudo-utilitarianism, and I would fain believe that the system may
be good for the children of very rich parents, or for those who show a
natural instinct to acquire hypothetical lore; but the misery was that
their Ydgrun-worship required all people with any pretence to
respectability to send their children to some one or other of these
schools, mulcting them of years of money. It astonished me to see what
sacrifices the parents would make in order to render their children as
nearly useless as possible; and it was hard to say whether the old
suffered most from the expense which they were thus put to, or the young
from being deliberately swindled in some of the most important branches
of human inquiry, and directed into false channels or left to drift in
the great majority of cases.

I cannot think I am mistaken in believing that the growing tendency to
limit families by infanticide--an evil which was causing general alarm
throughout the country--was almost entirely due to the way in which
education had become a fetish from one end of Erewhon to the other.
Granted that provision should be made whereby every child should be
taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, but here compulsory state-aided
education should end, and the child should begin (with all due
precautions to ensure that he is not overworked) to acquire the rudiments
of that art whereby he is t