In the higher schools, the female sex
is trained in gymnastics, swimming, rowing and marching.[218]

The Socialist system of education, properly regulated and ordered and
placed under the direction of a sufficient force, continues up to the
age when society shall determine that its youth shall enter upon their
majority. Both sexes are fully qualified to exercise all the rights and
fill all the duties that society demands from its adult members. Society
now enjoys the certainty of having brought up only thorough, fully
developed members, human beings to whom nothing natural is strange, as
familiar with their nature as with the nature and conditions of society
which they join full-righted.

The daily increasing excesses of our modern youth--all of them the
inevitable consequences of the present tainted and decomposing state of
society--will have vanished. Impropriety of conduct, disobedience,
immorality and rude pleasure-seeking, such as is especially noticeable
among the youth of our higher educational institutions--the gymnasia,
polytechnics, universities, etc.--vices that are incited and promoted by
the existing demoralization and unrest of domestic life, by the
poisonous influence of social life such as the immoral literature that
wealth procures--all these will likewise have vanished. In equal measure
will disappear the evil effects of the modern factory system and of
improper housing, that dissoluteness and self-assurance of youths at an
age when the human being is most in need of reining and education in
self-control. All these evils future society will escape without the
need of coercive measures. The nature of the social institutions and of
the mental atmosphere, that will spring from them and that will rule
society itself, rendering impossible the breaking out of such evils; as
in Nature disease and the destruction of organisms can appear only when
there is a state of decay that invites disease; so likewise in society.

No one will deny that our present system of instruction and of education
suffers of serious defects--the higher schools and educational
establishments even more so than the lower. The village school is a
paragon of moral health compared with the college; common schools for
the manual training of poor girls are paragons of morality compared with
many leading boarding schools for girls. The reason is not far to seek.
In the upper classes of society, every aspiration after higher human
aims is sm