Page:Roads to freedom.djvu/199

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The World as it Could be Made
197

with consequent listlessness and lack of health in later life. Education will be far more diversified than at present: greater care will be taken to adapt it to the needs of different types of young people. There will be more attempt to encourage initiative among pupils and less desire to fill their minds with a set of beliefs and mental habits regarded as desirable by the State, chiefly because they help to preserve the status quo. For the great majority of children it will probably be found desirable to have much more outdoor education in the country. And for older boys and girls whose interests are not intellectual or artistic, technical education, undertaken in a liberal spirit, is far more useful in promoting mental activity than book-learning, which they regard (however falsely) as wholly useless except for purposes of examination. The really useful education is that which follows the direction of the child's own instinctive interests, supplying knowledge for which it is seeking, not dry, detailed information wholly out of relation to its spontaneous desires.

Government and Law will still exist in our community, but both will be reduced to a minimum. There will still be acts which will be forbidden—for example, murder. But very nearly the whole of that part of the criminal law which deals with property will have become obsolete, and many of the motives which now produce murders will be no longer operative. Those who nevertheless still do commit crimes will not be blamed or regarded as wicked: they will be regarded as unfortunate, and kept in some kind of