Free Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence Page B

talked of. But she could not imagine the taste of chocolate biscuits, the smell of beefsteak braised in wine, or the song of the blackbird. Bill Harnden could not convey taste, or scent, or sound, to someone brought up in concrete corridors, on cloned egg yolk and carrot juice, where human voices were the only natural sounds. He could not convey past realities in a windowless classroom to these children of the dust.
    Without text books or writing materials he tried to teach them literature and history. With only computer video pictures he tried to teach them art. Lacking the basic tools for making things he tried to teach them crafts. He insisted they needed a fully comprehensive education, that concentration on maths, and science, and computer learning, did not make for a balanced intellect. He believed that a teacher was more than an educational supervisor, that human interactions were of paramount importance to understanding, that the stimulation of a child's imagination was even more necessary than teaching it to calculate. On those issues he clashed with the bunker hierarchy, with the Education Chief, with General MacAllister, and with his wife.
    'We need creative thinkers,' said Bill. 'Not a generation of automatons!'
    'Logical thought can be just as creative,' Erica said. 
    'It's a dead end without imagination. The human brain has two sides to it and both are meant to be used. What's the good in raising calculative geniuses who are incapable of understanding anything but their own calculations? One-track minds, blind to all else?'
    In the small family apartment with pale green walls, where the paint flaked away to show bare plaster underneath, Ophelia listened as her parents exchanged words. Usually, in the evenings, there was only herself and her father with Erica working away in the laboratory, but tonight she had joined them. The conversation that had begun in the dining hall over a meal of chicken-flavoured soya bean stew, still continued. Apparently Mrs Allison was having trouble with Dwight, and Erica blamed Bill. She said his teaching methods were filling Dwight's head with stuff and nonsense and rebellious ideas.
    'These young people have to accept things as they are,' Erica said. 'They don't need to know how things used to be, or what things might become again in the future. We don't need dreamers. We need scientists and technologists. They're the ones who will make the breakthrough, Bill. They're the ones on whom our future depends.'
    'You're darned right!' said Bill. 'Our future does depend on them . . . their ability to create something better than the world we have now, or the world of the past. If they don't know about the past they have nothing to compare the present to, and nothing to feed their imagination on which a future society depends.'
    'That imagination has to be fostered in the right way!' Erica retorted. 'You're encouraging them to want what they can't have! Flipping poetics, Bill! Beauty, and truth, and freedom, the pursuit of personal happiness . . . there's no room for that in an enclosed environment. Dwight Allison is a very clever boy. We need his skills. If we can't get a breakthrough in genetic engineering then we'll have to go on living underground. He could design the city of the future ... a brilliant architect, Bill, if you don't turn him into a blasted revolutionary!'
    'What use is an architect who can't make bricks?' Bill asked her. 'We're teaching all the wrong things! If we forget how to use our hands and our hearts what good can we do with our heads? Who's going to build the fabled city?'
    'When the time comes we'll recruit outside workers,' Erica said.
    'Suppose they don't want to be recruited?'
    'Oh come on, Bill! Everyone has to work for a living.'
    'They are working, woman! They're working for themselves! Working to survive in conditions as we have never known! What right do we have to expect them to give up their own enterprises and work for us? It's you who are the