CHAPTER X: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS



"Well," said the old man, shifting in his chair, "you must get on
with your questions, Guest; I have been some time answering this
first one."

Said I: "I want an extra word or two about your ideas of education;
although I gathered from Dick that you let your children run wild and
didn't teach them anything; and in short, that you have so refined
your education, that now you have none."

"Then you gathered left-handed," quoth he. "But 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 slave-holders' 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