“Well,” said my companion, “but what could they do? Once you begin making schools for the children, you start out on the principle that education is learning how to live—and you end here.”
I pondered this. “Not necessarily,” I said at last. “You might have ended with schools in which the children of the poor were taught how to be efficient wage-slaves.”
“Ah, yes,” said my friend, “but they smashed that attempt away back in 1924.”
“Did they? I’m very glad to hear it!” I cried.... “By the bye, how much do these schools cost—all over the country?”
“Less per year than we spent per day on the Second Colonial War.... But this is enough of description. You shall see for yourself. Come!” he said.
We started toward the theatre.
“Play,” he was saying, “is according to our ideas more fundamental and more important in life than work. Consequently the theatre—”
But what he said about the theatre would take us far from anything which we are now accustomed to consider education. It involves no less a heresy than the calm assumption that the artist type is the highest human type, and that the chief service which education can perform for the future is the deliberate cultivation of the faculty of “creative dreaming.”...
I venture to quote only one sentence:
“Mankind needs more poets.”