Contents
| I | The Child [13] |
| II | The School Building [22] |
| III | The Teacher [27] |
| IV | The Book [36] |
| V | The Magic Theory of Education [47] |
| VI | The Caste System of Education [53] |
| VII | The Canonization of Book-Magic [58] |
| VIII | The Conquest of Culture in America [63] |
| IX | Smith, Jones and Robinson [69] |
| X | Employer vs. Trade Unionist [74] |
| XI | The Goose-Step [77] |
| XII | The Gary Plan [80] |
| XIII | Learning to Work [83] |
| XIV | Learning to Play [90] |
| XV | First and Last Things [96] |
| XVI | The Child as Artist [100] |
| XVII | The Artist as a Child [115] |
| XVIII | The Drama of Education [124] |
| XIX | The Drama of Life [132] |
| XX | Curiosity [137] |
| XXI | The Right to be Wrong [149] |
| XXII | Enterprise [157] |
| XXIII | Democracy [167] |
| XXIV | Responsibility [173] |
| XXV | Love [180] |
| XXVI | Education in 1947 A. D. [190] |
Were You Ever a Child?
WERE you ever a child?...
I ask out of no indecent curiosity as to your past. But I wish to address only those who would naturally be interested in the subject of Education. Those who haven’t been children themselves are in many respects fortunate beings; but they lack the background of bitter experience which makes this, to the rest of us, an acutely interesting theme—and they might just as well stop reading right here. I pause to allow them to put the book aside....
With my remaining audience, fit though few, I feel that I can get down at once to the brass tacks of the situation. We have all been educated—and just look at us!
We ourselves, as products of an educational system, are sufficiently damning evidence against it. If we think of what we happily might have been, and then of what we are, we cannot but concede the total failure or the helpless inadequacy of our education to educe those possibilities of ours into actuality.
Looking back on those years upon years which we spent in school, we know that something was wrong. In this respect our adult convictions find impressive support in our earlier views on the subject. If we will remember, we did not, at the time, exactly approve of the school system. Many of us, in fact, went in for I. W. W. tactics—especially sabotage. Our favourite brand of sabotage was the “withdrawal of efficiency”—in our case a kind of instinctive passive resistance. Amiable onlookers, such as our parents or the board of education, might have thought that we were learning something all the while; but that’s just where we fooled ’em! There were, of course, a few of us who really learned and remembered everything—who could state off-hand, right now, if anybody asked us, in what year Norman the Conqueror landed in England. But the trouble is that so few people ask us!