education at all, and would never open a book if they were not forced
to. I have known many such persons who have been forced to the point
of obtaining University degrees. And for all the effect their literary
exercises has left on them they might just as well have been put on the
treadmill. In fact they are actually less literate than the treadmill
would have left them; for they might by chance have picked up and dipped
into a volume of Shakespear or a translation of Homer if they had not
been driven to loathe every famous name in literature. I should probably
know as much Latin as French, if Latin had not been made the excuse for
my school imprisonment and degradation.




Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport

If we are to discuss the importance of art, learning, and intellectual
culture, the first thing we have to recognize is that we have very
little of them at present; and that this little has not been produced by
compulsory education: nay, that the scarcity is unnatural and has been
produced by the violent exclusion of art and artists from schools. On
the other hand we have quite a considerable degree of bodily culture:
indeed there is a continual outcry against the sacrifice of mental
accomplishments to athletics. In other words a sacrifice of the
professed object of compulsory education to the real object of voluntary
education. It is assumed that this means that people prefer bodily
to mental culture; but may it not mean that they prefer liberty and
satisfaction to coercion and privation. Why is it that people who have
been taught Shakespear as a school subject loathe his plays and cannot
by any means be persuaded ever to open his works after they escape from