Page 199 - erewhon

branches of human inquiry, and directed into false chan-
nels or left to drift in the great majority of cases.
I cannot think I am mistaken in believing that the grow-
ing tendency to limit families by infanticide—an evil which
was causing general alarm throughout the country—was al-
most 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 compul-
sory state-aided education should end, and the child should
begin (with all due precautions to ensure that he is not over-
worked) to acquire the rudiments of that art whereby he is
to earn his living.
He cannot acquire these in what we in England call
schools of technical education; such schools are cloister
life as against the rough and tumble of the world; they un-
fit, rather than fit for work in the open. An art can only be
learned in the workshop of those who are winning their
bread by it.
Boys, as a rule, hate the artificial, and delight in the ac-
tual; give them the chance of earning, and they will soon
earn. When parents find that their children, instead of
being made artificially burdensome, will early begin to con-
tribute to the well-being of the family, they will soon leave
off killing them, and will seek to have that plenitude of off-
spring which they now avoid. As things are, the state lays
greater burdens on parents than flesh and blood can bear,
and then wrings its hands over an evil for which it is itself
mainly responsible.

1 Erewhon