f. Never was such a mistake. Mental
consciousness is a purely individual affair. Some men are born to be
highly and delicately conscious. But for the vast majority, much
mental consciousness is simply a catastrophe, a blight. It just stops
their living.

Our business, at the present, is to prevent at all cost the young idea
from shooting. The ideal mind, the brain, has become the vampire of
modern life, sucking up the blood and the life. There is hardly an
original thought or original utterance possible to us. All is sickly
repetition of stale, stale ideas.

Let all schools be closed at once. Keep only a few technical training
establishments, nothing more. Let humanity lie fallow, for two
generations at least. Let no child learn to read, unless it learns by
itself, out of its own individual persistent desire.

That is my serious admonition, gentle reader. But I am not so flighty
as to imagine you will pay any heed. But if I thought you would, I
should feel my hope surge up. And if you _don't_ pay any heed,
calamity will at length shut your schools for you, sure enough.

The process of transfer from the primary consciousness to recognized
mental consciousness is a mystery like every other transfer. Yet it
follows its own laws. And here we begin to approach the confines of
orthodox psychology, upon which we have no desire to trespass. But
this we _can_ say. The degree of transfer from primary to mental
consciousness varies with every individual. But in most individuals
the natural degree is very low.

The process of transfer from primary consciousness is called
sublimation, the sublimating of the potential body of knowledge with
the definite reality of the idea. And with this process we have
identified all education. The very derivation of the Latin word
_education_ shows us. Of course it should mean the leading forth of
each nature to its fullness. But with us, fools that we are, it is the
leading forth of the primary consciousness, the potential or dynamic
consciousness, into mental consciousness, which is finite and static.
Now before we set out so gayly to lead our children _en bloc_ out of
the dynamic into the static way of consciousness, let us consider a
moment what we are doing.

A child in the womb can have no _idea_ of the mother. I think orthodox
psychology will allow us so much. And yet the child in the womb must
be dynamically conscious of the mother. Otherwise how could it
maintain a definite and pro