elementary school. The heed of their entering a wage earning occupation just as soon as the law will allow drives them out of the school into the store or the factory when they are barely half educated, according to modern standards. While sons and daughters of the rich, often listless, lazy and without ambition, are driven through college just because their families can afford to give them a college education, sons and daughters of the poor, though intelligent and eager to improve their minds, are taken out of school at fourteen and even younger, and are set to perform one monotonous, mind-killing task for the greater part of their lives. Present-day society provides the means for education without furnishing the opportunity. It also is contented with merely feeding the mind while starving the body. The little children who are sent to school every morning cold, because they are poorly clothed and poorly housed, hungry because they are habitually underfed, tired because they must labor beside studying, make our present system of education a farce to thousands upon thousands of human beings who might become educated, efficient citizens. Socialism will feed the body as well as the mind. By driving the demon poverty out of the world forever it will produce a race physically fit for a higher and nobler mental development. It is self-understood that educational facilities and opportunities will be the same for both sexes under Socialism. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the mental training of women was completely neglected. Not even a common school education was available for girls. At present, and particularly in the United States, women have larger opportunities to become educated than men because there are more women than men in the leisure class. Sufficient time and leisure for a general, broad education will be available for all in the future.
It may be assumed that obligatory school attendance will be prolonged in the coming society. Instead of girls and boys being put to work at fourteen, their education may extend to the eighteenth or twentieth year. This assumption is entirely in keeping with the general line of progress in the past and the present. Among primitive
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