t teach citizenship and political science at school.
But must we? There is no must about it, the hard fact being that we must
_not_ teach political science or citizenship at school. The schoolmaster
who attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets
without pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded
indictment for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the
morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the
military conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of
the illustrious and the successful. In vain do the prophets who see
through this imposture preach and teach a better gospel: the individuals
whom they convert are doomed to pass away in a few years; and the new
generations are dragged back in the schools to the morality of the
fifteenth century, and think themselves Liberal when they are defending
the ideas of Henry VII, and gentlemanly when they are opposing to them
the ideas of Richard III. Thus the educated man is a greater nuisance
than the uneducated one: indeed it is the inefficiency and sham of the
educational side of our schools (to which, except under compulsion,
children would not be sent by their parents at all if they did not act
as prisons in which the immature are kept from worrying the mature) that
save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of
drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance. There is no way out
through the schoolmaster.

HOMEOPATHIC EDUCATION

In truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any
other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is
said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or
may not be true: what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he
will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable
to cure himself the next time it attacks him. Therefore, if you want
to see a cat clean, you throw a bucket of mud over it, when it will
immediately take extraordinary pains to lick the mud off, and finally be
cleaner than it was before. In the same way doctors who are up-to-date
(BURGE-LUBIN per cent of all the registered practitioners, and 20 per
cent of the unregistered ones), when they want to rid you of a disease
or a symptom, inoculate you with that disease or give you a drug that
produces that symptom, in order to provoke you to resist it as the mud
provokes the cat to wash itself.

Now