He cannot acquire these in what we in England call schools of technical
education; such schools are cloister life as against the rough and tumble
of the world; they unfit, rather than fit for work in the open. An art
can only be learned in the workshop of those who are winning their bread
by it.
Boys, as a rule, hate the artificial, and delight in the actual; give
them the chance of earning, and they will soon earn. When parents find
that their children, instead of being made artificially burdensome, will
early begin to contribute to the well-being of the family, they will soon
leave off killing them, and will seek to have that plenitude of offspring
which they now avoid. As things are, the state lays greater burdens on
parents than flesh and blood can bear, and then wrings its hands over an
evil for which it is itself mainly responsible.
With the less well-dressed classes the harm was not so great; for among
these, at about ten years old, the child has to begin doing something: if
he is capable he makes his way up; if he is not, he is at any rate not
made more incapable by what his friends are pleased to call his
education. People find their level as a rule; and though they
unfortunately sometimes miss it, it is in the main true that those who
have valuable qualities are perceived to have them and can sell them.
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