mposed on the meaning of the
word.

But before I close this chapter I must be allowed to give one
illustration in support of my contention that the education given in
Utopia is useful. Of the many complaints that are brought against the
output of our elementary schools, one of the most serious is that the
boys and girls who have recently left school are voracious readers of
a vicious and demoralising literature which seems to be provided for
their special benefit. The reason why they take so readily to this
garbage is that they have lost their appetite for wholesome food.
They are not interested in healthy literature, in Nature-study, in
music, in art, in handicraft,--in any pursuit which might take them
out of themselves into a larger and freer life; and so they fall
victims to the allurements of a literature which appeals to their
baser, more sensual, and more selfish instincts,--the very instincts
which growth (in the true sense of the word) spontaneously relegates
to a subordinate position and places under effective control. It is
the inertness, the apathy, the low vitality of the average child of
fourteen, which is the cause of his undoing. His taste for false and
meretricious excitement--a taste which may lead him far along the
downward path--is the outcome of his very instinct to live, an
instinct which, though repressed by the influences that have choked
its natural channels, cannot resign itself to extinction, and at
last, in its despairing effort to energise, forces for itself the
artificial outlet of an imaginative interest in vice and crime.

The "young person" who, on leaving school, becomes a voracious
devourer of unwholesome literature, cannot be said to have received
a "useful" education. That vice and crime--whether practised or
imagined--are in the first instance artificial outlets, outlets which
the soul would not use if its expansive instincts were duly fostered,
is proved by the absence of "naughtiness" in the Utopian school,
and the absence of any taste for morbid excitement amongst Utopian
ex-scholars. The unwholesome literature which gives so much concern
to those who are interested in the welfare of the young, is unknown
in Utopia. And in this, as in other matter, the "goodness" of the
children and "young persons" is due, not to any lack of life and
spirit, but to the very abundance of their vitality. Apart from the
fact that vigorous growth, whether in plant or animal or human soul,
is in it