Aha, I've found the relevant section of William Morris' utopia now. It's on pp23 -25 and it involves the narrator of the tale (who has awoken to mysteriously find himself in a very different England) being shown around by one of this new world's long-time residents:
"School?" he said, "yes, what do you mean by that word? I don't see that it can have anything to do with children. We talk, indeed, of a school of herring, and a school of painting ... but otherwise," said he, laughing, "I must own myself beaten." ...
... I thought I had best say nothing about the boy-farms which I had been used to call schools, as I saw pretty clearly that they had disappeared; and so I said after a little fumbling, "I was using the word in the sense of a system of education."
"Education?" said he, meditatively, "I know enough Latin to know that the word must come from 'educere', to lead out; ... but I have never met anybody who could give me a clear explanation of what it means." ...
... "Well, education means a system of teaching young people." ...
... "I can assure you our children learn, whether they go through a 'system of teaching' or not."
And so it goes on, with the narrator discovering that all children learn according to their aptitudes to swim, to ride, to thatch and carpenter and cook. That learning to read is a matter of waiting until the books that are lying around are interesting enough to encourage the child to decode the symbols. That writing necessarily comes later, when the child is dextrous enough to make the calligraphy 'handsome' [here we have Morris the handicrafts-obsessive at work!] Languages are picked up as necessary, and
"many people study facts about the make of things and the matters of cause and effect ... and some ... will spend time over mathematics. 'Tis no use forcing people's tastes."
This discussion happens just a couple of pages ahead of the tale's narrator discovering that the new use of the Houses of Parliament is as a store for manure. So, not much change there, then!
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