ty and character. A much
more sensible explanation is that the so-called dunces are not exhausted
before they begin the serious business of life. It is said that boys
will be boys; and one can only add one wishes they would. Boys really
want to be manly, and are unfortunately encouraged thoughtlessly in this
very dangerous and overstraining aspiration. All the people who have
really worked (Herbert Spencer for instance) warn us against work as
earnestly as some people warn us against drink. When learning is placed
on the voluntary footing of sport, the teacher will find himself saying
every day "Run away and play: you have worked as much as is good for
you." Trying to make children leave school will be like trying to make
them go to bed; and it will be necessary to surprise them with the idea
that teaching is work, and that the teacher is tired and must go play or
rest or eat: possibilities always concealed by that infamous humbug
the current schoolmaster, who achieves a spurious divinity and a witch
doctor's authority by persuading children that he is not human, just as
ladies persuade them that they have no legs.

Children and Game: a Proposal

Of the many wild absurdities of our existing social order perhaps the
most grotesque is the costly and strictly enforced reservation of large
tracts of country as deer forests and breeding grounds for pheasants
whilst there is so little provision of the kind made for children.
I have more than once thought of trying to introduce the shooting
of children as a sport, as the children would then be preserved very
carefully for ten months in the year, thereby reducing their death rate
far more than the fusillades of the sportsmen during the other two would
raise it. At present the killing of a fox except by a pack of foxhounds
is regarded with horror; but you may and do kill children in a hundred
and fifty ways provided you do not shoot them or set a pack of dogs on
them. It must be admitted that the foxes have the best of it; and indeed
a glance at our pheasants, our deer, and our children will convince the
most sceptical that the children have decidedly the worst of it.

This much hope, however, can be extracted from the present state of
things. It is so fantastic, so mad, so apparently impossible, that no
scheme of reform need ever henceforth be discredited on the ground that
it is fantastic or mad or apparently impossible. It is the sensible
schemes, unfortunately, that