ldren so that they may
understand. Understanding is a fallacy and a vice in most people. I
don't even want my child to know, much less to understand. _I_ don't
want my child to know that five fives are twenty-five, any more than I
want my child to wear my hat or my boots. I _don't_ want my child to
_know_. If he wants five fives let him count them on his fingers. As
for his little mind, give it a rest, and let his dynamic self be
alert. He will ask "why" often enough. But he more often asks why the
sun shines, or why men have mustaches, or why grass is green, than
anything sensible. Most of a child's questions are, and should be,
unanswerable. They are not questions at all. They are exclamations of
wonder, they are _remarks_ half-sceptically addressed. When a child
says, "Why is grass green?" he half implies. "Is it really green, or
is it just taking me in?" And we solemnly begin to prate about
chlorophyll. Oh, imbeciles, idiots, inexcusable owls!

The whole of a child's development goes on from the great dynamic
centers, and is basically non-mental. To introduce mental activity is
to arrest the dynamic activity, and stultify true dynamic development.
By the age of twenty-one our young people are helpless, hopeless,
selfless, floundering mental entities, with nothing in front of them,
because they have been starved from the roots, systematically, for
twenty-one years, and fed through the head. They have had all their
mental excitements, sex and everything, all through the head, and when
it comes to the actual thing, why, there's nothing in it. _Blase._ The
affective centers have been exhausted from the head.

Before the age of fourteen, children should be taught only to move, to
act, to _do_. And they should be taught as little as possible even of
this. Adults simply cannot and do not know any more what the mode of
childish intelligence is. Adults _always_ interfere. They _always_
force the adult mental mode. Therefore children must be preserved from
adult instructions.

Make a child work--yes. Make it do little jobs. Keep a fine and
delicate and fierce discipline, so that the little jobs are performed
as perfectly as is consistent with the child's nature. Make the child
alert, proud, and becoming in its movements. Make it know very
definitely that it shall not and must not trespass on other people's
privacy or patience. Teach it songs, tell it tales. But _never_
instruct it school-wise. And mostly, leave it alone, s