is that efforts for universal and
compulsory education cannot keep pace with the overproduction of
children. Even at the best, leaving out of consideration the public
school system as the inevitable prey and plundering-ground of the cheap
politician and job-hunter, present methods of wholesale and syndicated
"education" are not suited to compete with the unceasing, unthinking,
untiring procreative powers of our swarming, spawning populations.

Into such schools as described in the recent reports of the Public
Education Association, no intelligent parent would dare send his child.
They are not merely fire-traps and culture-grounds of infection, but of
moral and intellectual contamination as well. More and more are public
schools in America becoming institutions for subjecting children to
a narrow and reactionary orthodoxy, aiming to crush out all signs
of individuality, and to turn out boys and girls compressed into a
standardized pattern, with ready-made ideas on politics, religion,
morality, and economics. True education cannot grow out of such
compulsory herding of children in filthy fire-traps.

Character, ability, and reasoning power are not to be developed in
this fashion. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether even a completely
successful educational system could offset the evils of indiscriminate
breeding and compensate for the misfortune of being a superfluous child.
In recognizing the great need of education, we have failed to recognize
the greater need of inborn health and character. "If it were necessary
to choose between the task of getting children educated and getting them
well born and healthy," writes Havelock Ellis, "it would be better to
abandon education. There have been many great peoples who never dreamed
of national systems of education; there have been no great peoples
without the art of producing healthy and vigorous children. The matter
becomes of peculiar importance in great industrial states, like
England, the United States and Germany, because in such states, a tacit
conspiracy tends to grow up to subordinate national ends to individual
ends, and practically to work for the deterioration of the race."(8)

Much less can education solve the great problem of child labor. Rather,
under the conditions prevailing in modern society, child labor and the
failure of the public schools to educate are both indices of a more
deeply rooted evil. Both bespeak THE UNDERVALUATION OF THE CHILD. This
undervaluat