 of course I understand your
point of view about education, which is that of times past, when the struggle
for life, as men used to phrase it (i. e., the struggle for a slave's rations on
one side, and for a bouncing share of the slaveholders' privilege on the other),
pinched education for most people into a niggardly dole of not very accurate
information; something to be swallowed by the beginner in the art of living
whether he liked it or not, and was hungry for it or not: and which had been
chewed and digested over and over again by people who didn't care about it in
order to serve it out to other people who didn't care about it.«
    I stopped the old man's rising wrath by a laugh, and said: »Well, you were
not taught that way, at any rate, so you may let your anger run off you a
little.«
    »True, true,« said he, smiling. »I thank you for correcting my ill-temper: I
always fancy myself as living in any period of which we may be speaking. But,
however, to put it in a cooler way: you expected to see children thrust into
schools when they had reached an age conventionally supposed to be the due age,
whatever their varying faculties and dispositions might be, and when there, with
like disregard to facts to be subjected to a certain conventional course of
learning. My friend, can't you see that such a proceeding means ignoring the
fact of growth, bodily and mental? No one could come out of such a mill
uninjured; and those only would avoid being crushed by it who would have the
spirit of rebellion strong in them. Fortunately most children have had that at
all times, or I do not know that we should ever have reached our present
position. Now you see what it all comes to. In the old times all this was the
result of poverty. In the nineteenth century, society was so miserably poor,
owing to the systematised robbery on which it was founded, that real education
was impossible for anybody. The whole theory of their so-called education was
that it was necessary to shove a little information into a child, even if it
were by means of torture, and accompanied by twaddle which it was well known was
of no use, or else he would lack information lifelong: the hurry of poverty
forbade anything else. All that is past; we are no longer hurried, and the
information lies ready to each one's
