CHAPTER X: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.
"Well," said the old man, shifting in his chair, "you must get on with your questions, Guest; I have been some time answering this first one." Said I: "I want an extra word or two about your ideas of education; although I gathered from Dick that you let your children run wild and didn't teach them anything; and in short, that you have so refined your education, that now you have none." "Then you gathered left-handed," quoth he.

"But of course I understand your point of view about education, which is that of times past, when 'the struggle for life,' as men used to phrase it (_i.e._, the struggle for a slave's rations on one side, and for a bouncing share of the slave- holders' privilege on the other), pinched 'education' for most people into a niggardly dole of not very accurate information; something to be swallowed by the beginner in the art of living whether he liked it or not, and was hungry for it or not: and which had been chewed and digested over and over again by people who didn't care about it in order to serve it out to other people who didn't care about it." I stopped the old man's rising wrath by a laugh, and said: "Well, _you_ were not taught that way, at any rate, so you may let your anger run off you a little." "True, true," said he, smiling.

"I thank you for correcting my ill-temper: I always fancy myself as living in any period of which we may be speaking.

But, however, to put it in a cooler way: you expected to see children thrust into schools when they had reached an age conventionally supposed to be the due age, whatever their varying faculties and dispositions might be, and when there, with like disregard to facts to be subjected to a certain conventional course of 'learning.' My friend, can't you see that such a proceeding means ignoring the fact of _growth_, bodily and mental?
No one could come out of such a mill uninjured; and those only would avoid being crushed by it who would have the spirit of rebellion strong in them.

Fortunately most children have had that at all times, or I do not know that we should ever have reached our present position.