are annotated and paraphrased by dullards, and the
annotations and paraphrases forced on all young people by imprisonment
and flogging and scolding, there will not be a single man of letters or
higher mathematician the more in the country: on the contrary there will
be less, as so many potential lovers of literature and mathematics will
have been incurably prejudiced against them. Everyone who is conversant
with the class in which child imprisonment and compulsory schooling is
carried out to the final extremity of the university degree knows that
its scholastic culture is a sham; that it knows little about literature
or art and a great deal about point-to-point races; and that the
village cobbler, who has never read a page of Plato, and is admittedly
a dangerously ignorant man politically, is nevertheless a Socrates
compared to the classically educated gentlemen who discuss politics in
country houses at election time (and at no other time) after their day's
earnest and skilful shooting. Think of the years and years of weary
torment the women of the piano-possessing class have been forced to
spend over the keyboard, fingering scales. How many of them could be
bribed to attend a pianoforte recital by a great player, though they
will rise from sick beds rather than miss Ascot or Goodwood?

Another familiar fact that teaches the same lesson is that many women
who have voluntarily attained a high degree of culture cannot add
up their own housekeeping books, though their education in simple
arithmetic was compulsory, whereas their higher education has been
wholly voluntary. Everywhere we find the same result. The imprisonment,
the beating, the taming and laming, the breaking of young spirits, the
arrest of development, the atrophy of all inhibitive power except the
power of fear, are real: the education is sham. Those who have been
taught most know least.

Antichrist

Among the worst effects of the unnatural segregation of children in
schools and the equally unnatural constant association of them with
adults in the family is the utter defeat of the vital element in
Christianity. Christ stands in the world for that intuition of the
highest humanity that we, being members one of another, must not
complain, must not scold, must not strike, nor revile nor persecute nor
revenge nor punish. Now family life and school life are, as far as the
moral training of children is concerned, nothing but the deliberate
inculcation of