And not with ease only, but with effect.

It is, as we have seen, through the action of an appropriate sense, and in no other way, that the information which is supplied to the scholar, when he is learning this or that subject, is converted into _knowledge_, and is so made available both for the further understanding of the given subject and for the nutrition of the scholar's own inner life.
From every point of view, then, the Utopian scholar has a marked advantage, in respect of the things with which education is supposed to be mainly concerned--the mastery of subjects and the acquisition of knowledge--over the product of the conventional type of school.
Whatever the Utopian may have to learn, is a pleasure to him either for its own sake or as a means to some desirable end.

Whatever he may have to learn, he learns with comparative ease, because his perceptive faculties have been systematically trained, and he is therefore at home, in greater or lesser degree, in any new environment.

And whatever he may have to learn, he learns with effect, because he is able to digest the information that he receives, and convert it into knowledge, and so retain it in the form in which it will best conduce both to his further progress in that particular branch of study and to the general building up of his mind.
In the ordinary result-hunting school the scholar fares very differently from this.

As a rule, he takes but little pleasure in his work, for subjects which have their chief value as means to desirable ends are presented to him as ends in themselves, and as such are rightly regarded by him as meaningless and therefore as intolerably dull; while subjects which are either intrinsically attractive, as being natural channels of self-expression, or potentially attractive as providing opportunities for self-expression, have no attraction for him, as in neither case is self-expression on his part permitted.
Again, he finds great difficulty in mastering the subjects on his time-table, or even in making the first step towards mastering them, for, owing to his perceptive faculties as a whole having been starved by the repressive _regime_ which denied them the outlet of expression, he has not evolved the power of putting forth an appropriate sense in response to the stimulus of a new environment, and is therefore helpless in the presence of what is unfamiliar or unexpected.