such an elementary but vital point as the law of economic rent is a
_pons asinorum_ never to be approached, much less crossed? Or from the
common voter who is mostly so hard at work all day earning a living that
he cannot keep awake for five minutes over a book?


IS THERE ANY HOPE IN EDUCATION?

The usual answer is that we must educate our masters: that is,
ourselves. We must teach citizenship and political science at school.
But must we? There is no must about it, the hard fact being that we must
_not_ teach political science or citizenship at school. The schoolmaster
who attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets
without pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded
indictment for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the
morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the
military conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of
the illustrious and the successful. In vain do the prophets who see
through this imposture preach and teach a better gospel: the individuals
whom they convert are doomed to pass away in a few years; and the new
generations are dragged back in the schools to the morality of the
fifteenth century, and think themselves Liberal when they are defending
the ideas of Henry VII, and gentlemanly when they are opposing to them
the ideas of Richard III. Thus the educated man is a greater nuisance
than the uneducated one: indeed it is the inefficiency and sham of the
educational side of our schools (to which, except under compulsion,
children would not be sent by their parents at all if they did not act
as prisons in which the immature are kept from worrying the mature) that
save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of
drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance. There is no way out