ABSTRACT
The subject of education is one of the most difficult that any reformer has to consider. It might seem at first sight as though education afforded the key to social improvement, since undoubtedly better education would make all other reforms easy. But in fact most of the evils of existing education are direct consequences of the other evils from which industrial civilization is suffering, and cannot be radically cured until our economic system has been changed. Nevertheless something can be done, through public opinion among teachers, and to a lesser extent among parents, to make education less harmful in the meantime. There is not any one key position to be captured by those who aim at a less competitive and unjust organization of society; there are a number of connected positions to be attacked simultaneously, since any advance in one place brings with it correlated advances in all the others. In this chapter, we are concerned, not with education in Utopia, but with what can be done here and now to prevent the grosser evils of education as it is at present. I propose to confine myself in the main to
elementary education, since that alone can be considered as one of those mass phenomena with which this book is concerned.
