coercion. The eagerness of children in our industrial districts to
escape from school to the factory is not caused by lighter tasks or
shorter hours in the factory, nor altogether by the temptation of wages,
nor even by the desire for novelty, but by the dignity of adult work,
the exchange of the factitious personal tyranny of the schoolmaster,
from which the grown-ups are free, for the stern but entirely dignified
Laws of Life to which all flesh is subject.




University Schoolboyishness

Older children might do a good deal before beginning their collegiate
education. What is the matter with our universities is that all the
students are schoolboys, whereas it is of the very essence of university
education that they should be men. The function of a university is not
to teach things that can now be taught as well or better by University
Extension lectures or by private tutors or modern correspondence classes
with gramophones. We go to them to be socialized; to acquire the hall
mark of communal training; to become citizens of the world instead of
inmates of the enlarged rabbit hutches we call homes; to learn manners
and become unchallengeable ladies and gentlemen. The social pressure
which effects these changes should be that of persons who have faced
the full responsibilities of adults as working members of the general
community, not that of a barbarous rabble of half emancipated schoolboys
and unemancipable pedants. It is true that in a reasonable state of
society this outside experience would do for us very completely what the
university does now so corruptly that we tolerate its bad manners only
because they are better than no manners at all. But the university will