life.

(5) _The Inquisitive Instinct_.

As the inquisitive instinct makes the child an intolerable nuisance
to his ignorant and indolent elders, it is but natural that in the
unenlightened school, as in the unenlightened home, it should be
forcibly exterminated. It is through the agency of the formula "Don't
speak till you are spoken to," that its destruction is usually
effected. But under Egeria's aegis conversation in school hours is,
as we have seen, freely encouraged, and the child's right to ask
questions fully recognised; and one may therefore conjecture that
this proscribed and outlawed instinct will find a safe asylum in her
school. Whatever lesson may be in progress, the Utopian children are
allowed, and even expected, to seek for illumination whenever they
find themselves in the dark, to pause inquiringly at every obstacle
to their understanding what they have seen or heard or read.

The encouragement which is given in Utopia to the child who seeks to
gratify his desire for knowledge, is positive as well as negative.
When the obstacles which education usually places in his path have
been removed, it is found that the whole atmosphere of the school is
favourable to the growth of his inquisitive instinct. At every turn
he is called upon to plan and contrive, and is thus made to realise
his own limitations, and to try to escape from them. Whatever he may
have in hand,--be it the preparation for acting a new scene, or the
interpretation of a new Folk Song or Morris Dance, or the invention
of a new school game, or the thinking out some new way of treating a
"subject,"--he is sure to find that knowledge is needed if he is
to achieve success; and his desire for knowledge is therefore
continually stimulated by the demands that his own initiative and
activity are ever making upon him.

But it is in the "Nature lesson" that the inquisitive instinct finds
in Utopia its freest scope and its fullest opportunity. To one who
had persuaded himself of the innate stupidity of the average English
child, a Nature lesson in Utopia would come as a revelation. He would
learn for the first time that, far from being innately stupid, the
average English child has it in him to reach a very high level of
keenness, acuteness, and intellectual activity. Whenever a lesson is
given on a natural object, _e.g._ a flower or a leaf, every child has
a specimen and a lens. The object is then closely and carefully
observed, in the hope of d