s true that in a reasonable state of
society this outside experience would do for us very completely what the
university does now so corruptly that we tolerate its bad manners only
because they are better than no manners at all. But the university will
always exist in some form as a community of persons desirous of pushing
their culture to the highest pitch they are capable of, not as solitary
students reading in seclusion, but as members of a body of individuals
all pursuing culture, talking culture, thinking culture, above all,
criticizing culture. If such persons are to read and talk and criticize
to any purpose, they must know the world outside the university at least
as well as the shopkeeper in the High Street does. And this is just
what they do not know at present. You may say of them, paraphrasing
Mr. Kipling, "What do they know of Plato that only Plato know?" If our
universities would exclude everybody who had not earned a living by his
or her own exertions for at least a couple of years, their effect would
be vastly improved.

The New Laziness

The child of the future, then, if there is to be any future but one of
decay, will work more or less for its living from an early age; and
in doing so it will not shock anyone, provided there be no longer any
reason to associate the conception of children working for their living
with infants toiling in a factory for ten hours a day or boys drudging
from nine to six under gas lamps in underground city offices. Lads and
lasses in their teens will probably be able to produce as much as the
most expensive person now costs in his own person (it is retinue that
eats up the big income) without working too hard or too long for quite
as much happiness as they can enjoy. The question to be balanced then
will be, not how soon people should be put to work, but how soon they
should be released from any obligation of the kind. A life's work is
like a day's work: it can begin early and leave off early or begin late
and leave off late, or, as with us, begin too early and never leave off
at all, obviously the worst of all possible plans. In any event we
must finally reckon work, not as the curse our schools and prisons and
capitalist profit factories make it seem today, but as a prime necessity
of a tolerable existence. And if we cannot devise fresh wants as fast
as we develop the means of supplying them, there will come a scarcity
of the needed, cut-and-dried, appointed work th