risks of education are enormous: every new power a child acquires,
from speaking, walking, and co-ordinating its vision, to conquering
continents and founding religions, opens up immense new possibilities of
mischief. Teach a child to write and you teach it how to forge: teach it
to speak and you teach it how to lie: teach it to walk and you teach it
how to kick its mother to death.

The great problem of slavery for those whose aim is to maintain it
is the problem of reconciling the efficiency of the slave with
the helplessness that keeps him in servitude; and this problem is
fortunately not completely soluble; for it is not in fact found possible
for a duke to treat his solicitor or his doctor as he treats his
laborers, though they are all equally his slaves: the laborer being in
fact less dependent on his favor than the professional man. Hence it is
that men come to resent, of all things, protection, because it so often
means restriction of their liberty lest they should make a bad use
of it. If there are dangerous precipices about, it is much easier
and cheaper to forbid people to walk near the edge than to put up an
effective fence: that is why both legislators and parents and the paid
deputies of parents are always inhibiting and prohibiting and punishing
and scolding and laming and cramping and delaying progress and growth
instead of making the dangerous places as safe as possible and then
boldly taking and allowing others to take the irreducible minimum of
risk.




English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual Cowardice