at is always ready to
everybody's hand. It may have to be shared out among people all of whom
want more of it. And then a new sort of laziness will become the bugbear
of society: the laziness that refuses to face the mental toil and
adventure of making work by inventing new ideas or extending the domain
of knowledge, and insists on a ready-made routine. It may come to
forcing people to retire before they are willing to make way for younger
ones: that is, to driving all persons of a certain age out of industry,
leaving them to find something experimental to occupy them on pain of
perpetual holiday. Men will then try to spend twenty thousand a year
for the sake of having to earn it. Instead of being what we are now, the
cheapest and nastiest of the animals, we shall be the costliest, most
fastidious, and best bred. In short, there is no end to the astonishing
things that may happen when the curse of Adam becomes first a blessing
and then an incurable habit. And in that day we must not grudge children
their share of it.

The Infinite School Task

The question of children's work, however, is only a question of what the
child ought to do for the community. How highly it should qualify itself
is another matter. But most of the difficulty of inducing children
to learn would disappear if our demands became not only definite but
finite. When learning is only an excuse for imprisonment, it is an
instrument of torture which becomes more painful the more progress is
made. Thus when you have forced a child to learn the Church Catechism,
a document profound beyond the comprehension of most adults, you are
sometimes at a standstill for something else to teach; and you therefore
keep the wretched child repeating its catechism again and again until
you hit on the plan of making it learn instalments of Bible verses,
preferably from the book of Numbers. But as it is less trouble to set a
lesson that you know yourself, there is a tendency to keep repeating the
already learnt lesson rather than break new ground. At school I began
with a fairly complete knowledge of Latin grammar in the childish sense
of being able to repeat all the paradigms; and I was kept at this, or
rather kept in a class where the master never asked me to do it because
he knew I could, and therefore devoted himself to trapping the boys who
could not, until I finally forgot most of it. But when progress took
place, what did it mean? First it meant Caesar, with the