Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/115

 shall return to this point later. This must suffice for the present suggestion.

A particularly important field for us is that of education. Popular schools have always occupied the attention of proletarian parties and they even played a great role in the old communistic sects of the Middle Ages. It must always be one of the aims of the thinking proletariat to deprive the possessing classes of the monopoly of culture. It is self-evident that the new regime would increase and improve the schools and pay their teachers better. But we would go still further. To be sure the victorious proletariat, no matter how radically minded it may be, cannot at a single stroke abolish class differences, for these have risen from many centuries of development and these causes and their results are not swept away as easily as a chalk mark is wiped from a slate with a sponge. But the school can prepare the road in this direction and contribute very essentially to the abolition of class differences in that all children will be equally well nourished and clothed, and instructed in the same manner while at the same time the possibility of a diverse development of their intellectual and bodily activities is retained.

We must not overvalue the influence of the school. Life is mightier than it and where it comes in opposition to actuality it will certainly be forced to give way. When, for example, the effort is made to-day to abolish class difference