knocked out of us. Schools are a strange contrivance; they do not occur in nature, yet somehow we suppose they do. Because a woman, by virtue of giving birth to a succession of children, is then landed with the task of bringing them up, is no cause to suppose children are best taught by the handful, the dozen, the score. Nature, as ever, provided a minimum, not a maximum, for our survival. Any mother knows that it takes more than one adult to cope properly with even a single child. The child has more energy and more passion than the adult. To make it sit still, sit up and oblige, because it is smaller than you and you can compel it, is unkind. To make it do so in company is bizarre.
In Darcy’s Utopia the first rule of education will be that in any school the teachers shall outnumber the pupils, and no pupil need attend who does not wish to do so. I suspect budding essayists and technicians will continue to turn up to be educated; those others, who find lessons a humiliation because they are daily exposed and defined as dullards, will not. Much will be gained by the individual and very little lost to society. Teachers, teaching only those who wish to learn, will regain their self-respect and that of their pupils. They will stay even-tempered from morning to night. In Darcy’s Utopia you will not see the eyes of the child dulling, the brow furrowing, as puberty arrives.
Children do quite like to gather together, in fits and starts, to enjoy one another’s company, to find out how others live. It is natural enough for them to want to acquire knowledge from their elders. But it is unreasonable from this to extrapolate ‘the school’ as one of the cornerstones of society—for what are schools but institutions in which, in the name of knowledge, we ghettoize the young, and keep them from adult company, coop up the violent with the meek, those who like learning with those who don’t, and in general fit them for the modern world, which one quick glimpse of the television will show them to be a violent, murderous, greedy, vulgar and horrid place, in which people in a good mood throw custard pies at one another and in a bad mood chop each other to pieces?
Q: I take it you did not like school?
A: I liked it very much. I was sorry for those who didn’t, who by far outnumbered those of us who did. I daresay the Faraday Junior was no worse than any other school: indeed even a little better. No one was moved to burn the place down and the teachers were not encouraged to beat the children: though I had my knuckles painfully rapped on various occasions when I had apparently failed to decode some mysterious message or other. Teachers get irritated, of course they do, their elaborate and expensive training courses notwithstanding. Why? Because they are doing the most unnatural thing in the world, which everyone tells them is perfectly natural, in order that little children should all sit down quiet and good in one place and learn to take the world for granted, and not attempt to change it.
Q: But you tried to escape? You did want to change your situation?
A: When you ask that you betray your belief that one class is indeed superior to another: that to be born to the uneducated lower classes is a singular life-problem: though I’m sure if I asked you straight you would, in your gentle, blind, liberal way, deny it. The class distinctions we employ, you would maintain, are descriptive not pejorative. The person with, say, the pinched and nasal accents of the English Midlands is no worse than the one whose language has the rounded and lordly ring of London’s Knightsbridge, merely different. Tell that to employers, boyfriends, doctors, the dinner party hostess. Second-class citizen! goes up in neon lights when those who use the pronunciation of the streets and not of the written word open their mouths. Rightly they are discriminated against! Woe unto them, say I, who do not seek to improve themselves but cling with misplaced loyalty to the speech of their parents, as they do to the homes they were born into.
In Darcy’s Utopia it will be as normal to practise elocution as to brush your teeth. If more than lip service is to be paid to the notion that we are all equal,