They will receive, like adults,
their share of necessaries, and their education will
be free.[60] There is no longer to be the present
competition for scholarships among the abler children:
they will not be imbued with the competitive spirit
from infancy, or forced to use their brains to an
unnatural degree with consequent listlessness and lack
of health in later life. Education will be far more
diversified than at present; greater care will be taken
to adapt it to the needs of different types of young
people. There will be more attempt to encourage
initiative young pupils, and less desire to fill their
minds with a set of beliefs and mental habits regarded
as desirable by the State, chiefly because they help
to preserve the status quo. For the great majority
of children it will probably be found desirable to
have much more outdoor education in the country.
And for older boys and girls whose interests are not
intellectual or artistic, technical education, undertaken
in a liberal spirit, is far more useful in promoting
mental activity than book-learning which they
regard (however falsely) as wholly useless except for
purposes of examination. The really useful educa-
tion is that which follows the direction of the child's
own instinctive interests, supplying knowledge for
which it is seeking, not dry, detailed information
wholly out of relation to its spontaneous desires.
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