Of the many complaints that are brought against the output of our elementary schools, one of the most serious is that the boys and girls who have recently left school are voracious readers of a vicious and demoralising literature which seems to be provided for their special benefit.

The reason why they take so readily to this garbage is that they have lost their appetite for wholesome food.
They are not interested in healthy literature, in Nature-study, in music, in art, in handicraft,--in any pursuit which might take them out of themselves into a larger and freer life; and so they fall victims to the allurements of a literature which appeals to their baser, more sensual, and more selfish instincts,--the very instincts which growth (in the true sense of the word) spontaneously relegates to a subordinate position and places under effective control.

It is the inertness, the apathy, the low vitality of the average child of fourteen, which is the cause of his undoing.

His taste for false and meretricious excitement--a taste which may lead him far along the downward path--is the outcome of his very instinct to live, an instinct which, though repressed by the influences that have choked its natural channels, cannot resign itself to extinction, and at last, in its despairing effort to energise, forces for itself the artificial outlet of an imaginative interest in vice and crime.
The "young person" who, on leaving school, becomes a voracious devourer of unwholesome literature, cannot be said to have received a "useful" education.

That vice and crime--whether practised or imagined--are in the first instance artificial outlets, outlets which the soul would not use if its expansive instincts were duly fostered, is proved by the absence of "naughtiness" in the Utopian school, and the absence of any taste for morbid excitement amongst Utopian ex-scholars.