Produced by Ron Burkey and Amy Thomte





A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

By Bernard Shaw



CONTENTS

     Parents and Children
     Trailing Clouds of Glory
     The Child is Father to the Man
     What is a Child?
     The Sin of Nadab and Abihu
     The Manufacture of Monsters
     Small and Large Families
     Children as Nuisances
     Child Fanciers
     Childhood as a State of Sin
     School
     My Scholastic Acquirements
     Schoolmasters of Genius
     What We Do Not Teach, and Why
     Taboo in Schools
     Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools
     What is to be Done?
     Children's Rights and Duties
     Should Children Earn their Living?
     Children's Happiness
     The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday
     University Schoolboyishness
     The New Laziness
     The Infinite School Task
     The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge
     English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual Cowardice
     The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness
     The Common Sense of Toleration
     The Sin of Athanasius
     The Experiment Experimenting
     Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport
     Antichrist
     Under the Whip
     Technical Instruction
     Docility and Dependence
     The Abuse of Docility
     The Schoolboy and the Homeboy
     The Comings of Age of Children
     The Conflict of Wills
     The Demagogue's Opportunity
     Our Quarrelsomeness
     We Must Reform Society before we can Reform Ourselves
     The Pursuit of Manners
     Not too much Wind on the Heath, Brother
     Wanted:  a Child's Magna Charta
     The Pursuit of Learning
     Children and Game:  a Proposal
     The Parents' Intolerable Burden
     Mobilization
     Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs
     How Little We Know About Our Parents
     Our Abandoned Mothers
     Family Affection
     The Fate of the Family
     Family Mourning
     Art Teaching
     The Impossibility of Secular Education
     Natural Selection as a Religion
     Moral Instruction Leagues
     The Bible
     Artist Idolatry
     "The Machine"
     The Provocation to Anarchism
     Imagination
     Government by Bullies




PARENTS AND CHILDREN



Trailing Clouds of Glory

Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of
the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Force
either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very low
organisms: indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba is
immortal. Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer than
their friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants are believed to
be capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human inhabitant. But
the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves that they are not
immortal. Do away with death and you do away with the need for birth: in
fact if you went on breeding, you would finally have to kill old people
to make room for young ones.

Now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the Life
Force. People with no imagination try to make things which will last for
ever, and even want to live for ever themselves. But the intelligently
imaginative man knows very well that it is waste of labor to make a
machine that will last ten years, because it will probably be superseded
in half that time by an improved machine answering the same purpose.
He also knows that if some devil were to convince us that our dream
of personal immortality is no dream but a hard fact, such a shriek of
despair would go up from the human race as no other conceivable horror
could provoke. With all our perverse nonsense as to John Smith living
for a thousand million eons and for ever after, we die voluntarily,
knowing that it is time for us to be scrapped, to be remanufactured, to
come back, as Wordsworth divined, trailing ever brightening clouds of
glory. We must all be born again, and yet again and again. We should
like to live a little longer just as we should like 50 pounds: that is,
we should take it if we could get it for nothing; but that sort of idle
liking is not will. It is amazing--considering the way we talk--how
little a man will do to get 50 pounds: all the 50-pound notes I have
ever known of have been more easily earned than a laborious sixpence;
but the difficulty of inducing a man to make any serious effort to
obtain 50 pounds is nothing to the difficulty of inducing him to make a
serious effort to keep alive. The moment he sees death approach, he gets
into bed and sends for a doctor. He knows very well at the back of
his conscience that he is rather a poor job and had better be
remanufactured. He knows that his death will make room for a birth; and
he hopes that it will be a birth of something that he aspired to be and
fell short of. He knows that it is through death and rebirth that
this corruptible shall become incorruptible, and this mortal put on
immortality. Practise as you will on his ignorance, his fears, and his
imagination, with bribes of paradises and threats of hells, there is
only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its
victory; and that is the belief that we can lay down the burden of our
wretched little makeshift individualities for ever at each lift towards
the goal of evolution, which can only be a being that cannot be improved
upon. After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of
believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to
himself? Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be made
perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be myself,
nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present imperfections (and
what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that you may just as well
give me a new name and face the fact that I am a new person and that
the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton. Thus, oddly enough, the
conventional belief in the matter comes to this: that if you wish to
live for ever you must be wicked enough to be irretrievably damned,
since the saved are no longer what they were, and in hell alone do
people retain their sinful nature: that is to say, their individuality.
And this sort of hell, however convenient as a means of intimidating
persons who have practically no honor and no conscience, is not a fact.
Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way
out, not outside on the way in. Therefore let us give up telling one
another idle stories, and rejoice in death as we rejoice in birth; for
without death we cannot be born again; and the man who does not wish
to be born again and born better is fit only to represent the City of
London in Parliament, or perhaps the university of Oxford.




The Child is Father to the Man

Is he? Then in the name of common sense why do we always treat children
on the assumption that the man is father to the child? Oh, these
fathers! And we are not content with fathers: we must have godfathers,
forgetting that the child is godfather to the man. Has it ever struck
you as curious that in a country where the first article of belief is
that every child is born with a godfather whom we all call "our father
which art in heaven," two very limited individual mortals should
be allowed to appear at its baptism and explain that they are its
godparents, and that they will look after its salvation until it is no
longer a child. I had a godmother who made herself responsible in this
way for me. She presented me with a Bible with a gilt clasp and edges,
larger than the Bibles similarly presented to my sisters, because my sex
entitled me to a heavier article. I must have seen that lady at least
four times in the twenty years following. She never alluded to my
salvation in any way. People occasionally ask me to act as godfather to
their children with a levity which convinces me that they have not the
faintest notion that it involves anything more than calling the helpless
child George Bernard without regard to the possibility that it may grow
up in the liveliest abhorrence of my notions.

A person with a turn for logic might argue that if God is the Father of
all men, and if the child is father to the man, it follows that the true
representative of God at the christening is the child itself. But such
posers are unpopular, because they imply that our little customs, or,
as we often call them, our religion, mean something, or must originally
have meant something, and that we understand and believe that something.

However, my business is not to make confusion worse confounded, but to
clear it up. Only, it is as well to begin by a sample of current thought
and practice which shews that on the subject of children we are very
deeply confused. On the whole, whatever our theory or no theory may
be, our practice is to treat the child as the property of its immediate
physical parents, and to allow them to do what they like with it as far
as it will let them. It has no rights and no liberties: in short, its
condition is that which adults recognize as the most miserable and
dangerous politically possible for themselves: namely, the condition of
slavery. For its alleviation we trust to the natural affection of the
parties, and to public opinion. A father cannot for his own credit let
his son go in rags. Also, in a very large section of the population,
parents finally become dependent on their children. Thus there are
checks on child slavery which do not exist, or are less powerful, in the
case of manual and industrial slavery. Sensationally bad cases fall into
two classes, which are really the same class: namely, the children
whose parents are excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of petting
children, and the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the
sensual luxury of physically torturing them. There is a Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children which has effectually made an end of
our belief that mothers are any more to be trusted than stepmothers, or
fathers than slave-drivers. And there is a growing body of law designed
to prevent parents from using their children ruthlessly to make money
for the household. Such legislation has always been furiously resisted
by the parents, even when the horrors of factory slavery were at
their worst; and the extension of such legislation at present would be
impossible if it were not that the parents affected by it cannot control
a majority of votes in Parliament. In domestic life a great deal of
service is done by children, the girls acting as nursemaids and general
servants, and the lads as errand boys. In the country both boys and
girls do a substantial share of farm labor. This is why it is necessary
to coerce poor parents to send their children to school, though in the
relatively small class which keeps plenty of servants it is impossible
to induce parents to keep their children at home instead of paying
schoolmasters to take them off their hands.

It appears then that the bond of affection between parents and children
does not save children from the slavery that denial of rights involves
in adult political relations. It sometimes intensifies it, sometimes
mitigates it; but on the whole children and parents confront one another
as two classes in which all the political power is on one side; and
the results are not at all unlike what they would be if there were no
immediate consanguinity between them, and one were white and the other
black, or one enfranchised and the other disenfranchised, or one ranked
as gentle and the other simple. Not that Nature counts for nothing in
the case and political rights for everything. But a denial of political
rights, and the resultant delivery of one class into the mastery of
another, affects their relations so extensively and profoundly that it
is impossible to ascertain what the real natural relations of the two
classes are until this political relation is abolished.




What is a Child?

An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect:
that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment
if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of
your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman.
If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be
played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to make money
for you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight its way through
in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts will
resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance; but if you
begin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn them for your own
purposes, then there is hardly any limit to the mischief you may do.
Swear at a child, throw your boots at it, send it flying from the room
with a cuff or a kick; and the experience will be as instructive to the
child as a difficulty with a short-tempered dog or a bull. Francis Place
tells us that his father always struck his children when he found one
within his reach. The effect on the young Places seems to have been
simply to make them keep out of their father's way, which was no doubt
what he desired, as far as he desired anything at all. Francis records
the habit without bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his
father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of
it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to his
country as that rare and admirable thing, a Freethinker: the only
sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose
religious convictions, command any respect.

Now Mr Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father; and
I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as compared
with the conventional good father who deliberately imposes himself on
his son as a god; who takes advantage of childish credulity and parent
worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is right and what
he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct on the
child by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and eulogies,
for which he claims divine sanction: compared to this sort of
abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost as a
Providence. Not that it is possible to live with children any more than
with grown-up people without imposing rules of conduct on them. There
is a point at which every person with human nerves has to say to a child
"Stop that noise." But suppose the child asks why! There are various
answers in use. The simplest: "Because it irritates me," may fail; for
it may strike the child as being rather amusing to irritate you; also
the child, having comparatively no nerves, may be unable to conceive
your meaning vividly enough. In any case it may want to make a noise
more than to spare your feelings. You may therefore have to explain
that the effect of the irritation will be that you will do something
unpleasant if the noise continues. The something unpleasant may be only
a look of suffering to rouse the child's affectionate sympathy (if it
has any), or it may run to forcible expulsion from the room with plenty
of unnecessary violence; but the principle is the same: there are no
false pretences involved: the child learns in a straightforward way that
it does not pay to be inconsiderate. Also, perhaps, that Mamma, who made
the child learn the Sermon on the Mount, is not really a Christian.




The Sin of Nadab and Abihu

But there is another sort of answer in wide use which is neither
straightforward, instructive, nor harmless. In its simplest form it
substitutes for "Stop that noise," "Dont be naughty," which means that
the child, instead of annoying you by a perfectly healthy and natural
infantile procedure, is offending God. This is a blasphemous lie; and
the fact that it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does not excuse it
in the least. Dickens tells us of a nurserymaid who elaborated it into
"If you do that, angels wont never love you." I remember a servant who
used to tell me that if I were not good, by which she meant if I did
not behave with a single eye to her personal convenience, the cock would
come down the chimney. Less imaginative but equally dishonest people
told me I should go to hell if I did not make myself agreeable to them.
Bodily violence, provided it be the hasty expression of normal provoked
resentment and not vicious cruelty, cannot harm a child as this sort of
pious fraud harms it. There is a legal limit to physical cruelty; and
there are also human limits to it. There is an active Society which
brings to book a good many parents who starve and torture and overwork
their children, and intimidates a good many more. When parents of this
type are caught, they are treated as criminals; and not infrequently
the police have some trouble to save them from being lynched. The
people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devote
themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is
called bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows
the way a child should go. All the ways discovered so far lead to the
horrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by
Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another
for scraps of food. Pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that precious
and sacred thing the child's conscience into an instrument of our own
convenience, and to use that wonderful and terrible power called Shame
to grind our own axe. It is the sin of stealing fire from the altar: a
sin so impudently practised by popes, parents, and pedagogues, that one
can hardly expect the nurserymaids to see any harm in stealing a few
cinders when they are worrited.

Into the blackest depths of this violation of children's souls one can
hardly bear to look; for here we find pious fraud masking the violation
of the body by obscene cruelty. Any parent or school teacher who takes
a secret and abominable delight in torture is allowed to lay traps into
which every child must fall, and then beat it to his or her heart's
content. A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obvious
conviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded, that the
only thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience and
perfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said, he must insist. As
one of them is not a virtue at all, and the other is the attribute of a
god, one can imagine what the lives of this gentleman's children would
have been if it had been possible for him to live down to his monstrous
and foolish pretensions. And yet he might have written his letter to The
Times (he very nearly did, by the way) without incurring any danger of
being removed to an asylum, or even losing his reputation for taking
a very proper view of his parental duties. And at least it was not a
trivial view, nor an ill meant one. It was much more respectable than
the general consensus of opinion that if a school teacher can devise a
question a child cannot answer, or overhear it calling omega omeega,
he or she may beat the child viciously. Only, the cruelty must be
whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretence of reluctance. It must be
for the child's good. The assailant must say "This hurts me more than
it hurts you." There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The injury to
the child would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly "I beat you
because I like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I can contrive
an excuse for it." But to represent this detestable lust to the child
as Divine wrath, and the cruelty as the beneficent act of God, which is
exactly what all our floggers do, is to add to the torture of the body,
out of which the flogger at least gets some pleasure, the maiming and
blinding of the child's soul, which can bring nothing but horror to
anyone.




The Manufacture of Monsters

This industry is by no means peculiar to China. The Chinese (they say)
make physical monsters. We revile them for it and proceed to make moral
monsters of our own children. The most excusable parents are those who
try to correct their own faults in their offspring. The parent who says
to his child: "I am one of the successes of the Almighty: therefore
imitate me in every particular or I will have the skin off your back"
(a quite common attitude) is a much more absurd figure than the man who,
with a pipe in his mouth, thrashes his boy for smoking. If you must hold
yourself up to your children as an object lesson (which is not at all
necessary), hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example. But
you had much better let the child's character alone. If you once allow
yourself to regard a child as so much material for you to manufacture
into any shape that happens to suit your fancy you are defeating the
experiment of the Life Force. You are assuming that the child does
not know its own business, and that you do. In this you are sure to be
wrong: the child feels the drive of the Life Force (often called the
Will of God); and you cannot feel it for him. Handel's parents no doubt
thought they knew better than their child when they tried to prevent
his becoming a musician. They would have been equally wrong and equally
unsuccessful if they had tried to prevent the child becoming a great
rascal had its genius lain in that direction. Handel would have been
Handel, and Napoleon and Peter of Russia _them_selves in spite of all
the parents in creation, because, as often happens, they were stronger
than their parents. But this does not happen always. Most children
can be, and many are, hopelessly warped and wasted by parents who are
ignorant and silly enough to suppose that they know what a human being
ought to be, and who stick at nothing in their determination to force
their children into their moulds. Every child has a right to its own
bent. It has a right to be a Plymouth Brother though its parents be
convinced atheists. It has a right to dislike its mother or father or
sister or brother or uncle or aunt if they are antipathetic to it. It
has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way
seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right
to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it
were its own father.




Small and Large Families

These rights have now become more important than they used to be,
because the modern practice of limiting families enables them to be
more effectually violated. In a family of ten, eight, six, or even four
children, the rights of the younger ones to a great extent take care of
themselves and of the rights of the elder ones too. Two adult parents,
in spite of a house to keep and an income to earn, can still interfere
to a disastrous extent with the rights and liberties of one child. But
by the time a fourth child has arrived, they are not only outnumbered
two to one, but are getting tired of the thankless and mischievous job
of bringing up their children in the way they think they should go. The
old observation that members of large families get on in the world
holds good because in large families it is impossible for each child to
receive what schoolmasters call "individual attention." The children
may receive a good deal of individual attention from one another in the
shape of outspoken reproach, ruthless ridicule, and violent resistance
to their attempts at aggression; but the parental despots are compelled
by the multitude of their subjects to resort to political rather than
personal rule, and to spread their attempts at moral monster-making over
so many children, that each child has enough freedom, and enough sport
in the prophylactic process of laughing at its elders behind their
backs, to escape with much less damage than the single child. In a large
school the system may be bad; but the personal influence of the head
master has to be exerted, when it is exerted at all, in a public way,
because he has little more power of working on the affections of the
individual scholar in the intimate way that, for example, the mother
of a single child can, than the prime minister has of working on the
affections of any individual voter.




Children as Nuisances

Experienced parents, when children's rights are preached to them, very
naturally ask whether children are to be allowed to do what they like.
The best reply is to ask whether adults are to be allowed to do what
they like. The two cases are the same. The adult who is nasty is not
allowed to do what he likes: neither can the child who likes to be
nasty. There is no difference in principle between the rights of a
child and those of an adult: the difference in their cases is one of
circumstance. An adult is not supposed to be punished except by process
of law; nor, when he is so punished, is the person whom he has injured
allowed to act as judge, jury, and executioner. It is true that
employers do act in this way every day to their workpeople; but this is
not a justified and intended part of the situation: it is an abuse
of Capitalism which nobody defends in principle. As between child and
parent or nurse it is not argued about because it is inevitable. You
cannot hold an impartial judicial inquiry every time a child misbehaves
itself. To allow the child to misbehave without instantly making it
unpleasantly conscious of the fact would be to spoil it. The adult has
therefore to take action of some sort with nothing but his conscience
to shield the child from injustice or unkindness. The action may be a
torrent of scolding culminating in a furious smack causing terror
and pain, or it may be a remonstrance causing remorse, or it may be a
sarcasm causing shame and humiliation, or it may be a sermon causing the
child to believe that it is a little reprobate on the road to hell. The
child has no defence in any case except the kindness and conscience of
the adult; and the adult had better not forget this; for it involves a
heavy responsibility.

And now comes our difficulty. The responsibility, being so heavy, cannot
be discharged by persons of feeble character or intelligence. And yet
people of high character and intelligence cannot be plagued with the
care of children. A child is a restless, noisy little animal, with
an insatiable appetite for knowledge, and consequently a maddening
persistence in asking questions. If the child is to remain in the room
with a highly intelligent and sensitive adult, it must be told, and if
necessary forced, to sit still and not speak, which is injurious to
its health, unnatural, unjust, and therefore cruel and selfish beyond
toleration. Consequently the highly intelligent and sensitive adult
hands the child over to a nurserymaid who has no nerves and can
therefore stand more noise, but who has also no scruples, and may
therefore be very bad company for the child.

Here we have come to the central fact of the question: a fact nobody
avows, which is yet the true explanation of the monstrous system of
child imprisonment and torture which we disguise under such hypocrisies
as education, training, formation of character and the rest of it. This
fact is simply that a child is a nuisance to a grown-up person. What
is more, the nuisance becomes more and more intolerable as the grown-up
person becomes more cultivated, more sensitive, and more deeply engaged
in the highest methods of adult work. The child at play is noisy and
ought to be noisy: Sir Isaac Newton at work is quiet and ought to be
quiet. And the child should spend most of its time at play, whilst the
adult should spend most of his time at work. I am not now writing on
behalf of persons who coddle themselves into a ridiculous condition of
nervous feebleness, and at last imagine themselves unable to work
under conditions of bustle which to healthy people are cheerful and
stimulating. I am sure that if people had to choose between living where
the noise of children never stopped and where it was never heard, all
the goodnatured and sound people would prefer the incessant noise to the
incessant silence. But that choice is not thrust upon us by the nature
of things. There is no reason why children and adults should not see
just as much of one another as is good for them, no more and no less.
Even at present you are not compelled to choose between sending your
child to a boarding school (which means getting rid of it altogether on
more or less hypocritical pretences) and keeping it continually at home.
Most working folk today either send their children to day schools or
turn them out of doors. This solves the problem for the parents. It does
not solve it for the children, any more than the tethering of a goat in
a field or the chasing of an unlicensed dog into the streets solves
it for the goat or the dog; but it shews that in no class are people
willing to endure the society of their children, and consequently
that it is an error to believe that the family provides children with
edifying adult society, or that the family is a social unit. The family
is in that, as in so many other respects, a humbug. Old people and young
people cannot walk at the same pace without distress and final loss of
health to one of the parties. When they are sitting indoors they cannot
endure the same degrees of temperature and the same supplies of
fresh air. Even if the main factors of noise, restlessness, and
inquisitiveness are left out of account, children can stand with
indifference sights, sounds, smells, and disorders that would make an
adult of fifty utterly miserable; whilst on the other hand such
adults find a tranquil happiness in conditions which to children mean
unspeakable boredom. And since our system is nevertheless to pack them
all into the same house and pretend that they are happy, and that this
particular sort of happiness is the foundation of virtue, it is found
that in discussing family life we never speak of actual adults or actual
children, or of realities of any sort, but always of ideals such as
The Home, a Mother's Influence, a Father's Care, Filial Piety, Duty,
Affection, Family Life, etc. etc., which are no doubt very comforting
phrases, but which beg the question of what a home and a mother's
influence and a father's care and so forth really come to in practice.
How many hours a week of the time when his children are out of bed does
the ordinary bread-winning father spend in the company of his children
or even in the same building with them? The home may be a thieves'
kitchen, the mother a procuress, the father a violent drunkard; or the
mother and father may be fashionable people who see their children three
or four times a year during the holidays, and then not oftener than
they can help, living meanwhile in daily and intimate contact with their
valets and lady's-maids, whose influence and care are often dominant in
the household. Affection, as distinguished from simple kindliness, may
or may not exist: when it does it either depends on qualities in the
parties that would produce it equally if they were of no kin to one
another, or it is a more or less morbid survival of the nursing passion;
for affection between adults (if they are really adult in mind and not
merely grown-up children) and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel
as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be
called natural: in fact the evidence shews that it is easier to love the
company of a dog than of a commonplace child between the ages of six and
the beginnings of controlled maturity; for women who cannot bear to be
separated from their pet dogs send their children to boarding schools
cheerfully. They may say and even believe that in allowing their
children to leave home they are sacrificing themselves for their
children's good; but there are very few pet dogs who would not be
the better for a month or two spent elsewhere than in a lady's lap or
roasting on a drawingroom hearthrug. Besides, to allege that children
are better continually away from home is to give up the whole popular
sentimental theory of the family; yet the dogs are kept and the children
are banished.




Child Fanciers

There is, however, a good deal of spurious family affection. There is
the clannishness that will make a dozen brothers and sisters who quarrel
furiously among themselves close up their ranks and make common cause
against a brother-in-law or a sister-in-law. And there is a strong sense
of property in children, which often makes mothers and fathers bitterly
jealous of allowing anyone else to interfere with their children, whom
they may none the less treat very badly. And there is an extremely
dangerous craze for children which leads certain people to establish
orphanages and baby farms and schools, seizing any pretext for filling
their houses with children exactly as some eccentric old ladies and
gentlemen fill theirs with cats. In such places the children are the
victims of all the caprices of doting affection and all the excesses
of lascivious cruelty. Yet the people who have this morbid craze seldom
have any difficulty in finding victims. Parents and guardians are so
worried by children and so anxious to get rid of them that anyone who
is willing to take them off their hands is welcomed and whitewashed.
The very people who read with indignation of Squeers and Creakle in the
novels of Dickens are quite ready to hand over their own children
to Squeers and Creakle, and to pretend that Squeers and Creakle
are monsters of the past. But read the autobiography of Stanley the
traveller, or sit in the company of men talking about their school-days,
and you will soon find that fiction, which must, if it is to be sold and
read, stop short of being positively sickening, dare not tell the whole
truth about the people to whom children are handed over on educational
pretexts. Not very long ago a schoolmaster in Ireland was murdered by
his boys; and for reasons which were never made public it was at
first decided not to prosecute the murderers. Yet all these flogging
schoolmasters and orphanage fiends and baby farmers are "lovers of
children." They are really child fanciers (like bird fanciers or dog
fanciers) by irresistible natural predilection, never happy unless they
are surrounded by their victims, and always certain to make their living
by accepting the custody of children, no matter how many alternative
occupations may be available. And bear in mind that they are only
the extreme instances of what is commonly called natural affection,
apparently because it is obviously unnatural.

The really natural feeling of adults for children in the long prosaic
intervals between the moments of affectionate impulse is just that
feeling that leads them to avoid their care and constant company as a
burden beyond bearing, and to pretend that the places they send them to
are well conducted, beneficial, and indispensable to the success of the
children in after life. The true cry of the kind mother after her little
rosary of kisses is "Run away, darling." It is nicer than "Hold
your noise, you young devil; or it will be the worse for you"; but
fundamentally it means the same thing: that if you compel an adult and
a child to live in one another's company either the adult or the child
will be miserable. There is nothing whatever unnatural or wrong or
shocking in this fact; and there is no harm in it if only it be sensibly
faced and provided for. The mischief that it does at present is
produced by our efforts to ignore it, or to smother it under a heap of
sentimental lies and false pretences.




Childhood as a State of Sin

Unfortunately all this nonsense tends to accumulate as we become more
sympathetic. In many families it is still the custom to treat childhood
frankly as a state of sin, and impudently proclaim the monstrous
principle that little children should be seen and not heard, and to
enforce a set of prison rules designed solely to make cohabitation
with children as convenient as possible for adults without the smallest
regard for the interests, either remote or immediate, of the
children. This system tends to produce a tough, rather brutal, stupid,
unscrupulous class, with a fixed idea that all enjoyment consists in
undetected sinning; and in certain phases of civilization people of this
kind are apt to get the upper hand of more amiable and conscientious
races and classes. They have the ferocity of a chained dog, and are
proud of it. But the end of it is that they are always in chains,
even at the height of their military or political success: they
win everything on condition that they are afraid to enjoy it. Their
civilizations rest on intimidation, which is so necessary to them that
when they cannot find anybody brave enough to intimidate them they
intimidate themselves and live in a continual moral and political panic.
In the end they get found out and bullied. But that is not the point
that concerns us here, which is, that they are in some respects better
brought up than the children of sentimental people who are always
anxious and miserable about their duty to their children, and who end
by neither making their children happy nor having a tolerable life for
themselves. A selfish tyrant you know where to have, and he (or she) at
least does not confuse your affections; but a conscientious and kindly
meddler may literally worry you out of your senses. It is fortunate that
only very few parents are capable of doing what they conceive their duty
continuously or even at all, and that still fewer are tough enough to
ride roughshod over their children at home.




School

But please observe the limitation "at home." What private amateur
parental enterprise cannot do may be done very effectively by organized
professional enterprise in large institutions established for the
purpose. And it is to such professional enterprise that parents hand
over their children when they can afford it. They send their children
to school; and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for
innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison.
But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for
instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and
the governor (who of course would not be warders and governors if they
could write readable books), and beaten or otherwise tormented if you
cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the prison you
are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or
interest on subjects that they dont understand and dont care about, and
are therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a
prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains;
and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellow
prisoners. In a school you have none of these advantages. With the
world's bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the very
manna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to read
a hideous imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannot
write: a book from which no human being can learn anything: a book
which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense
read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of
a book all the rest of your life. With millions of acres of woods and
valleys and hills and wind and air and birds and streams and fishes and
all sorts of instructive and healthy things easily accessible, or with
streets and shop windows and crowds and vehicles and all sorts of city
delights at the door, you are forced to sit, not in a room with some
human grace and comfort or furniture and decoration, but in a stalled
pound with a lot of other children, beaten if you talk, beaten if you
move, beaten if you cannot prove by answering idiotic questions that
even when you escaped from the pound and from the eye of your gaoler,
you were still agonizing over his detestable sham books instead of
daring to live. And your childish hatred of your gaoler and flogger is
nothing to his adult hatred of you; for he is a slave forced to endure
your society for his daily bread. You have not even the satisfaction of
knowing how you are torturing him and how he loathes you; and you give
yourself unnecessary pains to annoy him with furtive tricks and spiteful
doing of forbidden things. No wonder he is sometimes provoked to
fiendish outbursts of wrath. No wonder men of downright sense, like Dr
Johnson, admit that under such circumstances children will not learn
anything unless they are so cruelly beaten that they make desperate
efforts to memorize words and phrases to escape flagellation. It is a
ghastly business, quite beyond words, this schooling.

And now I hear cries of protest arising all round. First my own
schoolmasters, or their ghosts, asking whether I was cruelly beaten at
school? No; but then I did not learn anything at school. Dr Johnson's
schoolmaster presumably did care enough whether Sam learned anything to
beat him savagely enough to force him to lame his mind--for
Johnson's great mind _was_ lamed--by learning his lessons. None of my
schoolmasters really cared a rap (or perhaps it would be fairer to them
to say that their employers did not care a rap and therefore did not
give them the necessary caning powers) whether I learnt my lessons or
not, provided my father paid my schooling bill, the collection of which
was the real object of the school. Consequently I did not learn my
school lessons, having much more important ones in hand, with the result
that I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns
as Johnson did when he should have been shaking England with the thunder
of his spirit. My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good
whatever: it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt; but I
escaped Squeers and Creakle just as I escaped Johnson and Carlyle. And
this is what happens to most of us. We are not effectively coerced to
learn: we stave off punishment as far as we can by lying and trickery
and guessing and using our wits; and when this does not suffice we
scribble impositions, or suffer extra imprisonments--"keeping in" was
the phrase in my time--or let a master strike us with a cane and fall
back on our pride at being able to hear it physically (he not being
allowed to hit us too hard) to outface the dishonor we should have been
taught to die rather than endure. And so idleness and worthlessness on
the one hand and a pretence of coercion on the other became a despicable
routine. If my schoolmasters had been really engaged in educating me
instead of painfully earning their bread by keeping me from annoying my
elders they would have turned me out of the school, telling me that I
was thoroughly disloyal to it; that I had no intention of learning; that
I was mocking and distracting the boys who did wish to learn; that I was
a liar and a shirker and a seditious little nuisance; and that nothing
could injure me in character and degrade their occupation more than
allowing me (much less forcing me) to remain in the school under such
conditions. But in order to get expelled, it was necessary commit
a crime of such atrocity that the parents of other boys would
have threatened to remove their sons sooner than allow them to be
schoolfellows with the delinquent. I can remember only one case in which
such a penalty was threatened; and in that case the culprit, a boarder,
had kissed a housemaid, or possibly, being a handsome youth, been kissed
by her. She did not kiss me; and nobody ever dreamt of expelling me. The
truth was, a boy meant just so much a year to the institution. That was
why he was kept there against his will. That was why he was kept there
when his expulsion would have been an unspeakable relief and benefit
both to his teachers and himself.

It may be argued that if the uncommercial attitude had been taken,
and all the disloyal wasters and idlers shewn sternly to the door,
the school would not have been emptied, but filled. But so honest an
attitude was impossible. The masters must have hated the school much
more than the boys did. Just as you cannot imprison a man without
imprisoning a warder to see that he does not escape, the warder being
tied to the prison as effectually by the fear of unemployment and
starvation as the prisoner is by the bolts and bars, so these poor
schoolmasters, with their small salaries and large classes, were as much
prisoners as we were, and much more responsible and anxious ones. They
could not impose the heroic attitude on their employers; nor would they
have been able to obtain places as schoolmasters if their habits had
been heroic. For the best of them their employment was provisional: they
looked forward to escaping from it into the pulpit. The ablest and most
impatient of them were often so irritated by the awkward, slow-witted,
slovenly boys: that is, the ones that required special consideration and
patient treatment, that they vented their irritation on them ruthlessly,
nothing being easier than to entrap or bewilder such a boy into giving a
pretext for punishing him.




My Scholastic Acquirements

The results, as far as I was concerned, were what might have been
expected. My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything
but Latin and Greek. When I went there as a very small boy I knew a good
deal of Latin grammar which I had been taught in a few weeks privately
by my uncle. When I had been several years at school this same uncle
examined me and discovered that the net result of my schooling was that
I had forgotten what he had taught me, and had learnt nothing else. To
this day, though I can still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of the
old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks
to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could
translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater
part of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, as to classical education,
another Shakespear. I can read French as easily as English; and under
pressure of necessity I can turn to account some scraps of German and
a little operatic Italian; but these I was never taught at school.
Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty
stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as
obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the
blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards. And
if I had been a boarder at an English public school instead of a day boy
at an Irish one, I might have had to add to these, deeper shames still.




Schoolmasters of Genius

And now, if I have reduced the ghosts of my schoolmasters to melancholy
acquiescence in all this (which everybody who has been at an ordinary
school will recognize as true), I have still to meet the much more
sincere protests of the handful of people who have a natural genius for
"bringing up" children. I shall be asked with kindly scorn whether I
have heard of Froebel and Pestalozzi, whether I know the work that is
being done by Miss Mason and the Dottoressa Montessori or, best of all
as I think, the Eurythmics School of Jacques Dalcroze at Hellerau near
Dresden. Jacques Dalcroze, like Plato, believes in saturating his pupils
with music. They walk to music, play to music, work to music, obey drill
commands that would bewilder a guardsman to music, think to music,
live to music, get so clearheaded about music that they can move their
several limbs each in a different metre until they become complicated
living magazines of cross rhythms, and, what is more, make music
for others to do all these things to. Stranger still, though Jacques
Dalcroze, like all these great teachers, is the completest of tyrants,
knowing what is right and that he must and will have the lesson just so
or else break his heart (not somebody else's, observe), yet his school
is so fascinating that every woman who sees it exclaims "Oh, why was I
not taught like this!" and elderly gentlemen excitedly enrol themselves
as students and distract classes of infants by their desperate endeavors
to beat two in a bar with one hand and three with the other, and start
off on earnest walks round the room, taking two steps backward whenever
Monsieur Daleroze calls out "Hop!" Oh yes: I know all about these
wonderful schools that you cannot keep children or even adults out of,
and these teachers whom their pupils not only obey without coercion, but
adore. And if you will tell me roughly how many Masons and Montessoris
and Dalcrozes you think you can pick up in Europe for salaries of from
thirty shillings to five pounds a week, I will estimate your chances
of converting your millions of little scholastic hells into little
scholastic heavens. If you are a distressed gentlewoman starting to make
a living, you can still open a little school; and you can easily buy a
secondhand brass plate inscribed PESTALOZZIAN INSTITUTE and nail it to
your door, though you have no more idea of who Pestalozzi was and what
he advocated or how he did it than the manager of a hotel which began
as a Hydropathic has of the water cure. Or you can buy a cheaper plate
inscribed KINDERGARTEN, and imagine, or leave others to imagine, that
Froebel is the governing genius of your little _creche_. No doubt the
new brass plates are being inscribed Montessori Institute, and will be
used when the Dotteressa is no longer with us by all the Mrs Pipchins
and Mrs Wilfers throughout this unhappy land.

I will go further, and admit that the brass plates may not all be
frauds. I will tell you that one of my friends was led to genuine
love and considerable knowledge of classical literature by an Irish
schoolmaster whom you would call a hedge schoolmaster (he would not be
allowed to teach anything now) and that it took four years of Harrow
to obliterate that knowledge and change the love into loathing. Another
friend of mine who keeps a school in the suburbs, and who deeply
deplores my "prejudice against schoolmasters," has offered to accept my
challenge to tell his pupils that they are as free to get up and go out
of the school at any moment as their parents are to get up and go out
of a theatre where my plays are being performed. Even among my own
schoolmasters I can recollect a few whose classes interested me, and
whom I should certainly have pestered for information and instruction
if I could have got into any decent human relationship with them, and
if they had not been compelled by their position to defend themselves as
carefully against such advances as against furtive attempts to hurt them
accidentally in the football field or smash their hats with a clod from
behind a wall. But these rare cases actually do more harm than good; for
they encourage us to pretend that all schoolmasters are like that.
Of what use is it to us that there are always somewhere two or three
teachers of children whose specific genius for their occupation triumphs
over our tyrannous system and even finds in it its opportunity? For that
matter, it is possible, if difficult, to find a solicitor, or even a
judge, who has some notion of what law means, a doctor with a glimmering
of science, an officer who understands duty and discipline, and a
clergyman with an inkling of religion, though there are nothing like
enough of them to go round. But even the few who, like Ibsen's Mrs
Solness, have "a genius for nursing the souls of little children" are
like angels forced to work in prisons instead of in heaven; and even
at that they are mostly underpaid and despised. That friend of mine who
went from the hedge schoolmaster to Harrow once saw a schoolmaster rush
from an elementary school in pursuit of a boy and strike him. My friend,
not considering that the unfortunate man was probably goaded
beyond endurance, smote the schoolmaster and blackened his eye. The
schoolmaster appealed to the law; and my friend found himself waiting
nervously in the Hammersmith Police Court to answer for his breach of
the peace. In his anxiety he asked a police officer what would happen
to him. "What did you do?" said the officer. "I gave a man a black eye"
said my friend. "Six pounds if he was a gentleman: two pounds if he
wasnt," said the constable. "He was a schoolmaster" said my friend. "Two
pounds" said the officer; and two pounds it was. The blood money was
paid cheerfully; and I have ever since advised elementary schoolmasters
to qualify themselves in the art of self-defence, as the British
Constitution expresses our national estimate of them by allowing us to
blacken three of their eyes for the same price as one of an ordinary
professional man. How many Froebels and Pestalozzis and Miss Masons and
Doctoress Montessoris would you be likely to get on these terms even if
they occurred much more frequently in nature than they actually do?

No: I cannot be put off by the news that our system would be perfect if
it were worked by angels. I do not admit it even at that, just as I do
not admit that if the sky fell we should all catch larks. But I do
not propose to bother about a supply of specific genius which does
not exist, and which, if it did exist, could operate only by at once
recognizing and establishing the rights of children.




What We Do Not Teach, and Why

To my mind, a glance at the subjects now taught in schools ought to
convince any reasonable person that the object of the lessons is to keep
children out of mischief, and not to qualify them for their part in life
as responsible citizens of a free State. It is not possible to maintain
freedom in any State, no matter how perfect its original constitution,
unless its publicly active citizens know a good deal of constitutional
history, law, and political science, with its basis of economics. If
as much pains had been taken a century ago to make us all understand
Ricardo's law of rent as to learn our catechisms, the face of the world
would have been changed for the better. But for that very reason the
greatest care is taken to keep such beneficially subversive
knowledge from us, with the result that in public life we are either
place-hunters, anarchists, or sheep shepherded by wolves.

But it will be observed that these are highly controversial subjects.
Now no controversial subject can be taught dogmatically. He who knows
only the official side of a controversy knows less than nothing of its
nature. The abler a schoolmaster is, the more dangerous he is to his
pupils unless they have the fullest opportunity of hearing another
equally able person do his utmost to shake his authority and convict him
of error.

At present such teaching is very unpopular. It does not exist in
schools; but every adult who derives his knowledge of public affairs
from the newspapers can take in, at the cost of an extra halfpenny, two
papers of opposite politics. Yet the ordinary man so dislikes having his
mind unsettled, as he calls it, that he angrily refuses to allow a paper
which dissents from his views to be brought into his house. Even at his
club he resents seeing it, and excludes it if it happens to run counter
to the opinions of all the members. The result is that his opinions are
not worth considering. A churchman who never reads The Freethinker very
soon has no more real religion than the atheist who never reads The
Church Times. The attitude is the same in both cases: they want to hear
nothing good of their enemies; consequently they remain enemies and
suffer from bad blood all their lives; whereas men who know their
opponents and understand their case, quite commonly respect and like
them, and always learn something from them.

Here, again, as at so many points, we come up against the abuse of
schools to keep people in ignorance and error, so that they may be
incapable of successful revolt against their industrial slavery. The
most important simple fundamental economic truth to impress on a
child in complicated civilizations like ours is the truth that whoever
consumes goods or services without producing by personal effort the
equivalent of what he or she consumes, inflicts on the community
precisely the same injury that a thief produces, and would, in any
honest State, be treated as a thief, however full his or her pockets
might be of money made by other people. The nation that first teaches
its children that truth, instead of flogging them if they discover
it for themselves, may have to fight all the slaves of all the other
nations to begin with; but it will beat them as easily as an unburdened
man with his hands free and with all his energies in full play can beat
an invalid who has to carry another invalid on his back.

This, however, is not an evil produced by the denial of children's
rights, nor is it inherent in the nature of schools. I mention it only
because it would be folly to call for a reform of our schools without
taking account of the corrupt resistance which awaits the reformer.

A word must also be said about the opposition to reform of the vested
interest of the classical and coercive schoolmaster. He, poor wretch,
has no other means of livelihood; and reform would leave him as a
workman is now left when he is superseded by a machine. He had therefore
better do what he can to get the workman compensated, so as to make the
public familiar with the idea of compensation before his own turn comes.




Taboo in Schools

The suppression of economic knowledge, disastrous as it is, is quite
intelligible, its corrupt motive being as clear as the motive of a
burglar for concealing his jemmy from a policeman. But the other great
suppression in our schools, the suppression of the subject of sex, is a
case of taboo. In mankind, the lower the type, and the less cultivated
the mind, the less courage there is to face important subjects
objectively. The ablest and most highly cultivated people continually
discuss religion, politics, and sex: it is hardly an exaggeration to say
that they discuss nothing else with fully-awakened interest. Commoner
and less cultivated people, even when they form societies for
discussion, make a rule that politics and religion are not to be
mentioned, and take it for granted that no decent person would attempt
to discuss sex. The three subjects are feared because they rouse the
crude passions which call for furious gratification in murder and rapine
at worst, and, at best, lead to quarrels and undesirable states of
consciousness.

Even when this excuse of bad manners, ill temper, and brutishness (for
that is what it comes to) compels us to accept it from those adults
among whom political and theological discussion does as a matter of fact
lead to the drawing of knives and pistols, and sex discussion leads to
obscenity, it has no application to children except as an imperative
reason for training them to respect other people's opinions, and to
insist on respect for their own in these as in other important matters
which are equally dangerous: for example, money. And in any case
there are decisive reasons; superior, like the reasons for
suspending conventional reticences between doctor and patient, to all
considerations of mere decorum, for giving proper instruction in the
facts of sex. Those who object to it (not counting coarse people who
thoughtlessly seize every opportunity of affecting and parading a
fictitious delicacy) are, in effect, advocating ignorance as a safeguard
against precocity. If ignorance were practicable there would be
something to be said for it up to the age at which ignorance is a danger
instead of a safeguard. Even as it is, it seems undesirable that any
special emphasis should be given to the subject, whether by way of
delicacy and poetry or too impressive warning. But the plain fact is
that in refusing to allow the child to be taught by qualified unrelated
elders (the parents shrink from the lesson, even when they are otherwise
qualified, because their own relation to the child makes the subject
impossible between them) we are virtually arranging to have our children
taught by other children in guilty secrets and unclean jests. And that
settles the question for all sensible people.

The dogmatic objection, the sheer instinctive taboo which rules the
subject out altogether as indecent, has no age limit. It means that
at no matter what age a woman consents to a proposal of marriage, she
should do so in ignorance of the relation she is undertaking. When this
actually happens (and apparently it does happen oftener than would seem
possible) a horrible fraud is being practiced on both the man and the
woman. He is led to believe that she knows what she is promising, and
that he is in no danger of finding himself bound to a woman to whom
he is eugenically antipathetic. She contemplates nothing but such
affectionate relations as may exist between her and her nearest kinsmen,
and has no knowledge of the condition which, if not foreseen, must come
as an amazing revelation and a dangerous shock, ending possibly in the
discovery that the marriage has been an irreparable mistake. Nothing can
justify such a risk. There may be people incapable of understanding that
the right to know all there is to know about oneself is a natural human
right that sweeps away all the pretences of others to tamper with one's
consciousness in order to produce what they choose to consider a good
character. But they must here bow to the plain mischievousness of
entrapping people into contracts on which the happiness of their whole
lives depends without letting them know what they are undertaking.




Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools

There is just one more nuisance to be disposed of before I come to
the positive side of my case. I mean the person who tells me that
my schooldays belong to a bygone order of educational ideas and
institutions, and that schools are not now a bit like my old school.
I reply, with Sir Walter Raleigh, by calling on my soul to give this
statement the lie. Some years ago I lectured in Oxford on the subject
of Education. A friend to whom I mentioned my intention said, "You know
nothing of modern education: schools are not now what they were when
you were a boy." I immediately procured the time sheets of half a dozen
modern schools, and found, as I expected, that they might all have been
my old school: there was no real difference. I may mention, too, that
I have visited modern schools, and observed that there is a tendency to
hang printed pictures in an untidy and soulless manner on the walls,
and occasionally to display on the mantel-shelf a deplorable glass case
containing certain objects which might possibly, if placed in the hands
of the pupils, give them some practical experience of the weight of
a pound and the length of an inch. And sometimes a scoundrel who has
rifled a bird's nest or killed a harmless snake encourages the children
to go and do likewise by putting his victims into an imitation nest and
bottle and exhibiting them as aids to "Nature study." A suggestion that
Nature is worth study would certainly have staggered my schoolmasters;
so perhaps I may admit a gleam of progress here. But as any child who
attempted to handle these dusty objects would probably be caned, I do
not attach any importance to such modernities in school furniture.
The school remains what it was in my boyhood, because its real object
remains what it was. And that object, I repeat, is to keep the children
out of mischief: mischief meaning for the most part worrying the
grown-ups.




What is to be Done?

The practical question, then, is what to do with the children. Tolerate
them at home we will not. Let them run loose in the streets we dare not
until our streets become safe places for children, which, to our utter
shame, they are not at present, though they can hardly be worse than
some homes and some schools.

The grotesque difficulty of making even a beginning was brought home to
me in the little village in Hertfordshire where I write these lines by
the lady of the manor, who asked me very properly what I was going to do
for the village school. I did not know what to reply. As the school kept
the children quiet during my working hours, I did not for the sake of
my own personal convenience want to blow it up with dynamite as I should
like to blow up most schools. So I asked for guidance. "You ought to
give a prize," said the lady. I asked if there was a prize for good
conduct. As I expected, there was: one for the best-behaved boy and
another for the best-behaved girl. On reflection I offered a handsome
prize for the worst-behaved boy and girl on condition that a record
should be kept of their subsequent careers and compared with the records
of the best-behaved, in order to ascertain whether the school criterion
of good conduct was valid out of school. My offer was refused because
it would not have had the effect of encouraging the children to give as
little trouble as possible, which is of course the real object of all
conduct prizes in schools.

I must not pretend, then, that I have a system ready to replace all
the other systems. Obstructing the way of the proper organization of
childhood, as of everything else, lies our ridiculous misdistribution
of the national income, with its accompanying class distinctions and
imposition of snobbery on children as a necessary part of their social
training. The result of our economic folly is that we are a nation of
undesirable acquaintances; and the first object of all our institutions
for children is segregation. If, for example, our children were set free
to roam and play about as they pleased, they would have to be policed;
and the first duty of the police in a State like ours would be to see
that every child wore a badge indicating its class in society, and that
every child seen speaking to another child with a lower-class badge, or
any child wearing a higher badge than that allotted to it by, say, the
College of Heralds, should immediately be skinned alive with a birch
rod. It might even be insisted that girls with high-class badges should
be attended by footmen, grooms, or even military escorts. In short,
there is hardly any limit to the follies with which our Commercialism
would infect any system that it would tolerate at all. But something
like a change of heart is still possible; and since all the evils of
snobbery and segregation are rampant in our schools at present we may as
well make the best as the worst of them.




Children's Rights and Duties

Now let us ask what are a child's rights, and what are the rights of
society over the child. Its rights, being clearly those of any other
human being, are summed up in the right to live: that is, to have all
the conclusive arguments that prove that it would be better dead, that
it is a child of wrath, that the population is already excessive, that
the pains of life are greater than its pleasures, that its sacrifice in
a hospital or laboratory experiment might save millions of lives,
etc. etc. etc., put out of the question, and its existence accepted
as necessary and sacred, all theories to the contrary notwithstanding,
whether by Calvin or Schopenhauer or Pasteur or the nearest person with
a taste for infanticide. And this right to live includes, and in fact
is, the right to be what the child likes and can, to do what it likes
and can, to make what it likes and can, to think what it likes and
can, to smash what it dislikes and can, and generally to behave in an
altogether unaccountable manner within the limits imposed by the similar
rights of its neighbors. And the rights of society over it clearly
extend to requiring it to qualify itself to live in society without
wasting other peoples time: that is, it must know the rules of the road,
be able to read placards and proclamations, fill voting papers, compose
and send letters and telegrams, purchase food and clothing and
railway tickets for itself, count money and give and take change, and,
generally, know how many beans made five. It must know some law, were it
only a simple set of commandments, some political economy, agriculture
enough to shut the gates of fields with cattle in them and not to
trample on growing crops, sanitation enough not to defile its haunts,
and religion enough to have some idea of why it is allowed its rights
and why it must respect the rights of others. And the rest of its
education must consist of anything else it can pick up; for beyond this
society cannot go with any certainty, and indeed can only go this far
rather apologetically and provisionally, as doing the best it can on
very uncertain ground.




Should Children Earn their Living?

Now comes the question how far children should be asked to contribute
to the support of the community. In approaching it we must put aside
the considerations that now induce all humane and thoughtful political
students to agitate for the uncompromising abolition of child labor
under our capitalist system. It is not the least of the curses of that
system that it will bequeath to future generations a mass of legislation
to prevent capitalists from "using up nine generations of men in one
generation," as they began by doing until they were restrained by law at
the suggestion of Robert Owen, the founder of English Socialism. Most of
this legislation will become an insufferable restraint upon freedom
and variety of action when Capitalism goes the way of Druidic human
sacrifice (a much less slaughterous institution). There is every reason
why a child should not be allowed to work for commercial profit or for
the support of its parents at the expense of its own future; but there
is no reason whatever why a child should not do some work for its own
sake and that of the community if it can be shewn that both it and the
community will be the better for it.




Children's Happiness

Also it is important to put the happiness of the children rather
carefully in its place, which is really not a front place. The
unsympathetic, selfish, hard people who regard happiness as a very
exceptional indulgence to which children are by no means entitled,
though they may be allowed a very little of it on their birthdays or at
Christmas, are sometimes better parents in effect than those who imagine
that children are as capable of happiness as adults. Adults habitually
exaggerate their own capacity in that direction grossly; yet most adults
can stand an allowance of happiness that would be quite thrown away on
children. The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother
about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation,
because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person
is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is
pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it. That is why it
is necessary to happiness that one should be tired. Music after dinner
is pleasant: music before breakfast is so unpleasant as to be clearly
unnatural. To people who are not overworked holidays are a nuisance.
To people who are, and who can afford them, they are a troublesome
necessity. A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.




The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday

It will be said here that, on the contrary, heaven is always conceived
as a perpetual holiday, and that whoever is not born to an independent
income is striving for one or longing for one because it gives holidays
for life. To which I reply, first, that heaven, as conventionally
conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable,
that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though
plenty of people have described a day at the seaside; and that the
genuine popular verdict on it is expressed in the proverb "Heaven for
holiness and Hell for company." Second, I point out that the wretched
people who have independent incomes and no useful occupation, do the
most amazingly disagreeable and dangerous things to make themselves
tired and hungry in the evening. When they are not involved in what they
call sport, they are doing aimlessly what other people have to be paid
to do: driving horses and motor cars; trying on dresses and walking up
and down to shew them off; and acting as footmen and housemaids to royal
personages. The sole and obvious cause of the notion that idleness is
delightful and that heaven is a place where there is nothing to be done,
is our school system and our industrial system. The school is a prison
in which work is a punishment and a curse. In avowed prisons, hard
labor, the only alleviation of a prisoner's lot, is treated as an
aggravation of his punishment; and everything possible is done to
intensify the prisoner's inculcated and unnatural notion that work is an
evil. In industry we are overworked and underfed prisoners. Under such
absurd circumstances our judgment of things becomes as perverted as our
habits. If we were habitually underworked and overfed, our notion
of heaven would be a place where everybody worked strenuously for
twenty-four hours a day and never got anything to eat.

Once realize that a perpetual holiday is beyond human endurance, and
that "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" and it will
be seen that we have no right to impose a perpetual holiday on children.
If we did, they would soon outdo the Labor Party in their claim for a
Right to Work Bill.

In any case no child should be brought up to suppose that its food and
clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty
space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea
of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation
to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the
repayment as a point of honor. If we did that today--and nothing but
flat dishonesty prevents us from doing it--we should have no idle rich
and indeed probably no rich, since there is no distinction in being
rich if you have to pay scot and lot in personal effort like the working
folk. Therefore, if for only half an hour a day, a child should do
something serviceable to the community.

Productive work for children has the advantage that its discipline is
the discipline of impersonal necessity, not that of wanton personal
coercion. The eagerness of children in our industrial districts to
escape from school to the factory is not caused by lighter tasks or
shorter hours in the factory, nor altogether by the temptation of wages,
nor even by the desire for novelty, but by the dignity of adult work,
the exchange of the factitious personal tyranny of the schoolmaster,
from which the grown-ups are free, for the stern but entirely dignified
Laws of Life to which all flesh is subject.




University Schoolboyishness

Older children might do a good deal before beginning their collegiate
education. What is the matter with our universities is that all the
students are schoolboys, whereas it is of the very essence of university
education that they should be men. The function of a university is not
to teach things that can now be taught as well or better by University
Extension lectures or by private tutors or modern correspondence classes
with gramophones. We go to them to be socialized; to acquire the hall
mark of communal training; to become citizens of the world instead of
inmates of the enlarged rabbit hutches we call homes; to learn manners
and become unchallengeable ladies and gentlemen. The social pressure
which effects these changes should be that of persons who have faced
the full responsibilities of adults as working members of the general
community, not that of a barbarous rabble of half emancipated schoolboys
and unemancipable pedants. It is true that in a reasonable state of
society this outside experience would do for us very completely what the
university does now so corruptly that we tolerate its bad manners only
because they are better than no manners at all. But the university will
always exist in some form as a community of persons desirous of pushing
their culture to the highest pitch they are capable of, not as solitary
students reading in seclusion, but as members of a body of individuals
all pursuing culture, talking culture, thinking culture, above all,
criticizing culture. If such persons are to read and talk and criticize
to any purpose, they must know the world outside the university at least
as well as the shopkeeper in the High Street does. And this is just
what they do not know at present. You may say of them, paraphrasing
Mr. Kipling, "What do they know of Plato that only Plato know?" If our
universities would exclude everybody who had not earned a living by his
or her own exertions for at least a couple of years, their effect would
be vastly improved.




The New Laziness

The child of the future, then, if there is to be any future but one of
decay, will work more or less for its living from an early age; and
in doing so it will not shock anyone, provided there be no longer any
reason to associate the conception of children working for their living
with infants toiling in a factory for ten hours a day or boys drudging
from nine to six under gas lamps in underground city offices. Lads and
lasses in their teens will probably be able to produce as much as the
most expensive person now costs in his own person (it is retinue that
eats up the big income) without working too hard or too long for quite
as much happiness as they can enjoy. The question to be balanced then
will be, not how soon people should be put to work, but how soon they
should be released from any obligation of the kind. A life's work is
like a day's work: it can begin early and leave off early or begin late
and leave off late, or, as with us, begin too early and never leave off
at all, obviously the worst of all possible plans. In any event we
must finally reckon work, not as the curse our schools and prisons and
capitalist profit factories make it seem today, but as a prime necessity
of a tolerable existence. And if we cannot devise fresh wants as fast
as we develop the means of supplying them, there will come a scarcity
of the needed, cut-and-dried, appointed work that is always ready to
everybody's hand. It may have to be shared out among people all of whom
want more of it. And then a new sort of laziness will become the bugbear
of society: the laziness that refuses to face the mental toil and
adventure of making work by inventing new ideas or extending the domain
of knowledge, and insists on a ready-made routine. It may come to
forcing people to retire before they are willing to make way for younger
ones: that is, to driving all persons of a certain age out of industry,
leaving them to find something experimental to occupy them on pain of
perpetual holiday. Men will then try to spend twenty thousand a year
for the sake of having to earn it. Instead of being what we are now, the
cheapest and nastiest of the animals, we shall be the costliest, most
fastidious, and best bred. In short, there is no end to the astonishing
things that may happen when the curse of Adam becomes first a blessing
and then an incurable habit. And in that day we must not grudge children
their share of it.




The Infinite School Task

The question of children's work, however, is only a question of what the
child ought to do for the community. How highly it should qualify itself
is another matter. But most of the difficulty of inducing children
to learn would disappear if our demands became not only definite but
finite. When learning is only an excuse for imprisonment, it is an
instrument of torture which becomes more painful the more progress is
made. Thus when you have forced a child to learn the Church Catechism,
a document profound beyond the comprehension of most adults, you are
sometimes at a standstill for something else to teach; and you therefore
keep the wretched child repeating its catechism again and again until
you hit on the plan of making it learn instalments of Bible verses,
preferably from the book of Numbers. But as it is less trouble to set a
lesson that you know yourself, there is a tendency to keep repeating the
already learnt lesson rather than break new ground. At school I began
with a fairly complete knowledge of Latin grammar in the childish sense
of being able to repeat all the paradigms; and I was kept at this, or
rather kept in a class where the master never asked me to do it because
he knew I could, and therefore devoted himself to trapping the boys who
could not, until I finally forgot most of it. But when progress took
place, what did it mean? First it meant Caesar, with the foreknowledge
that to master Caesar meant only being set at Virgil, with the
culminating horror of Greek and Homer in reserve at the end of that. I
preferred Caesar, because his statement that Gaul is divided into three
parts, though neither interesting nor true, was the only Latin sentence
I could translate at sight: therefore the longer we stuck at Caesar the
better I was pleased. Just so do less classically educated children see
nothing in the mastery of addition but the beginning of subtraction, and
so on through multiplication and division and fractions, with the black
cloud of algebra on the horizon. And if a boy rushes through all that,
there is always the calculus to fall back on, unless indeed you insist
on his learning music, and proceed to hit him if he cannot tell you the
year Beethoven was born.

A child has a right to finality as regards its compulsory lessons.
Also as regards physical training. At present it is assumed that the
schoolmaster has a right to force every child into an attempt to become
Porson and Bentley, Leibnitz and Newton, all rolled into one. This is
the tradition of the oldest grammar schools. In our times an even more
horrible and cynical claim has been made for the right to drive boys
through compulsory games in the playing fields until they are too much
exhausted physically to do anything but drop off to sleep. This is
supposed to protect them from vice; but as it also protects them from
poetry, literature, music, meditation and prayer, it may be dismissed
with the obvious remark that if boarding schools are places whose
keepers are driven to such monstrous measures lest more abominable
things should happen, then the sooner boarding schools are violently
abolished the better. It is true that society may make physical claims
on the child as well as mental ones: the child must learn to walk, to
use a knife and fork, to swim, to ride a bicycle, to acquire sufficient
power of self-defence to make an attack on it an arduous and uncertain
enterprise, perhaps to fly. What as a matter of common-sense it clearly
has not a right to do is to make this an excuse for keeping the child
slaving for ten hours at physical exercises on the ground that it is not
yet as dexterous as Cinquevalli and as strong as Sandow.




The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge

In a word, we have no right to insist on educating a child; for its
education can end only with its life and will not even then be complete.
Compulsory completion of education is the last folly of a rotten
and desperate civilization. It is the rattle in its throat before
dissolution. All we can fairly do is to prescribe certain definite
acquirements and accomplishments as qualifications for certain
employments; and to secure them, not by the ridiculous method of
inflicting injuries on the persons who have not yet mastered them, but
by attaching certain privileges (not pecuniary) to the employments.

Most acquirements carry their own privileges with them. Thus a baby has
to be pretty closely guarded and imprisoned because it cannot take
care of itself. It has even to be carried about (the most complete
conceivable infringement of its liberty) until it can walk. But nobody
goes on carrying children after they can walk lest they should walk into
mischief, though Arab boys make their sisters carry them, as our own
spoiled children sometimes make their nurses, out of mere laziness,
because sisters in the East and nurses in the West are kept in
servitude. But in a society of equals (the only reasonable and
permanently possible sort of society) children are in much greater
danger of acquiring bandy legs through being left to walk before they
are strong enough than of being carried when they are well able to walk.
Anyhow, freedom of movement in a nursery is the reward of learning to
walk; and in precisely the same way freedom of movement in a city is
the reward of learning how to read public notices, and to count and use
money. The consequences are of course much larger than the mere ability
to read the name of a street or the number of a railway platform and the
destination of a train. When you enable a child to read these, you also
enable it to read this preface, to the utter destruction, you may quite
possibly think, of its morals and docility. You also expose it to the
danger of being run over by taxicabs and trains. The moral and physical
risks of education are enormous: every new power a child acquires,
from speaking, walking, and co-ordinating its vision, to conquering
continents and founding religions, opens up immense new possibilities of
mischief. Teach a child to write and you teach it how to forge: teach it
to speak and you teach it how to lie: teach it to walk and you teach it
how to kick its mother to death.

The great problem of slavery for those whose aim is to maintain it
is the problem of reconciling the efficiency of the slave with
the helplessness that keeps him in servitude; and this problem is
fortunately not completely soluble; for it is not in fact found possible
for a duke to treat his solicitor or his doctor as he treats his
laborers, though they are all equally his slaves: the laborer being in
fact less dependent on his favor than the professional man. Hence it is
that men come to resent, of all things, protection, because it so often
means restriction of their liberty lest they should make a bad use
of it. If there are dangerous precipices about, it is much easier
and cheaper to forbid people to walk near the edge than to put up an
effective fence: that is why both legislators and parents and the paid
deputies of parents are always inhibiting and prohibiting and punishing
and scolding and laming and cramping and delaying progress and growth
instead of making the dangerous places as safe as possible and then
boldly taking and allowing others to take the irreducible minimum of
risk.




English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual Cowardice

It is easier to convert most people to the need for allowing their
children to run physical risks than moral ones. I can remember a
relative of mine who, when I was a small child, unused to horses and
very much afraid of them, insisted on putting me on a rather rumbustious
pony with little spurs on my heels (knowing that in my agitation I would
use them unconsciously), and being enormously amused at my terrors. Yet
when that same lady discovered that I had found a copy of The Arabian
Nights and was devouring it with avidity, she was horrified, and hid it
away from me lest it should break my soul as the pony might have broken
my neck. This way of producing hardy bodies and timid souls is so common
in country houses that you may spend hours in them listening to stories
of broken collar bones, broken backs, and broken necks without coming
upon a single spiritual adventure or daring thought.

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical
our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not
free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free
at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but
of 21 seconds.




The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness

The difficulty with children is that they need protection from risks
they are too young to understand, and attacks they can neither avoid
nor resist. You may on academic grounds allow a child to snatch glowing
coals from the fire once. You will not do it twice. The risks of
liberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance and
self-helplessness are another matter. Not only children but adults
need protection from them. At present adults are often exposed to risks
outside their knowledge or beyond their comprehension or powers of
resistance or foresight: for example, we have to look on every day
at marriages or financial speculations that may involve far worse
consequences than burnt fingers. And just as it is part of the business
of adults to protect children, to feed them, clothe them, shelter them,
and shift for them in all sorts of ways until they are able to shift for
themselves, it is coming more and more to be seen that this is true not
only of the relation between adults and children, but between adults and
adults. We shall not always look on indifferently at foolish marriages
and financial speculations, nor allow dead men to control live
communities by ridiculous wills and living heirs to squander and ruin
great estates, nor tolerate a hundred other absurd liberties that
we allow today because we are too lazy to find out the proper way to
interfere. But the interference must be regulated by some theory of the
individual's rights. Though the right to live is absolute, it is not
unconditional. If a man is unbearably mischievous, he must be killed.
This is a mere matter of necessity, like the killing of a man-eating
tiger in a nursery, a venomous snake in the garden, or a fox in the
poultry yard. No society could be constructed on the assumption that
such extermination is a violation of the creature's right to live, and
therefore must not be allowed. And then at once arises the danger into
which morality has led us: the danger of persecution. One Christian
spreading his doctrines may seem more mischievous than a dozen thieves:
throw him therefore to the lions. A lying or disobedient child may
corrupt a whole generation and make human Society impossible: therefore
thrash the vice out of him. And so on until our whole system of
abortion, intimidation, tyranny, cruelty and the rest is in full swing
again.




The Common Sense of Toleration

The real safeguard against this is the dogma of Toleration. I need not
here repeat the compact treatise on it which I prepared for the Joint
Committee on the Censorship of Stage Plays, and prefixed to The Shewing
Up of Blanco Posnet. It must suffice now to say that the present must
not attempt to schoolmaster the future by pretending to know good from
evil in tendency, or protect citizens against shocks to their opinions
and convictions, moral, political or religious: in other words it must
not persecute doctrines of any kind, or what is called bad taste,
and must insist on all persons facing such shocks as they face frosty
weather or any of the other disagreeable, dangerous, or bracing
incidents of freedom. The expediency of Toleration has been forced on us
by the fact that progressive enlightenment depends on a fair hearing for
doctrines which at first appear seditious, blasphemous, and immoral, and
which deeply shock people who never think originally, thought being with
them merely a habit and an echo. The deeper ground for Toleration is
the nature of creation, which, as we now know, proceeds by evolution.
Evolution finds its way by experiment; and this finding of the way
varies according to the stage of development reached, from the blindest
groping along the line of least resistance to intellectual speculation,
with its practical sequel of hypothesis and experimental verification;
or to observation, induction, and deduction; or even into so rapid and
intuitive an integration of all these processes in a single brain
that we get the inspired guess of the man of genius and the desperate
resolution of the teacher of new truths who is first slain as a
blasphemous apostate and then worshipped as a prophet.

Here the law for the child is the same as for the adult. The high priest
must not rend his garments and cry "Crucify him" when he is shocked:
the atheist must not clamor for the suppression of Law's Serious Call
because it has for two centuries destroyed the natural happiness of
innumerable unfortunate children by persuading their parents that it is
their religious duty to be miserable. It, and the Sermon on the Mount,
and Machiavelli's Prince, and La Rochefoucauld's maxims, and Hymns
Ancient and Modern, and De Glanville's apologue, and Dr. Watts's rhymes,
and Nietzsche's Gay Science, and Ingersoll's Mistakes of Moses, and the
speeches and pamphlets of the people who want us to make war on
Germany, and the Noodle's Orations and articles of our politicians and
journalists, must all be tolerated not only because any of them may for
all we know be on the right track but because it is in the conflict of
opinion that we win knowledge and wisdom. However terrible the wounds
suffered in that conflict, they are better than the barren peace of
death that follows when all the combatants are slaughtered or bound hand
and foot.

The difficulty at present is that though this necessity for Toleration
is a law of political science as well established as the law of
gravitation, our rulers are never taught political science: on the
contrary, they are taught in school that the master tolerates nothing
that is disagreeable to him; that ruling is simply being master; and
that the master's method is the method of violent punishment. And our
citizens, all school taught, are walking in the same darkness. As I
write these lines the Home Secretary is explaining that a man who has
been imprisoned for blasphemy must not be released because his remarks
were painful to the feelings of his pious fellow townsmen. Now it
happens that this very Home Secretary has driven many thousands of his
fellow citizens almost beside themselves by the crudity of his notions
of government, and his simple inability to understand why he should
not use and make laws to torment and subdue people who do not happen
to agree with him. In a word, he is not a politician, but a grown-up
schoolboy who has at last got a cane in his hand. And as all the rest of
us are in the same condition (except as to command of the cane) the only
objection made to his proceedings takes the shape of clamorous demands
that _he_ should be caned instead of being allowed to cane other people.




The Sin of Athanasius

It seems hopeless. Anarchists are tempted to preach a violent and
implacable resistance to all law as the only remedy; and the result of
that speedily is that people welcome any tyranny that will rescue them
from chaos. But there is really no need to choose between anarchy and
tyranny. A quite reasonable state of things is practicable if we proceed
on human assumptions and not on academic ones. If adults will frankly
give up their claim to know better than children what the purposes
of the Life Force are, and treat the child as an experiment like
themselves, and possibly a more successful one, and at the same time
relinquish their monstrous parental claims to personal private property
in children, the rest must be left to common sense. It is our attitude,
our religion, that is wrong. A good beginning might be made by enacting
that any person dictating a piece of conduct to a child or to anyone
else as the will of God, or as absolutely right, should be dealt with
as a blasphemer: as, indeed, guilty of the unpardonable sin against the
Holy Ghost. If the penalty were death, it would rid us at once of that
scourge of humanity, the amateur Pope. As an Irish Protestant, I raise
the cry of No Popery with hereditary zest. We are overrun with Popes.
From curates and governesses, who may claim a sort of professional
standing, to parents and uncles and nurserymaids and school teachers
and wiseacres generally, there are scores of thousands of human insects
groping through our darkness by the feeble phosphorescence of their own
tails, yet ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every
possible subject; to explain how and why the universe was made (in my
youth they added the exact date) and the circumstances under which
it will cease to exist; to lay down precise rules of right and wrong
conduct; to discriminate infallibly between virtuous and vicious
character; and all this with such certainty that they are prepared to
visit all the rigors of the law, and all the ruinous penalties of social
ostracism on people, however harmless their actions maybe who venture
to laugh at their monstrous conceit or to pay their assumptions the
extravagant compliment of criticizing them. As to children, who shall
say what canings and birchings and terrifyings and threats of hell fire
and impositions and humiliations and petty imprisonings and sendings
to bed and standing in corners and the like they have suffered because
their parents and guardians and teachers knew everything so much better
than Socrates or Solon?

It is this ignorant uppishness that does the mischief. A stranger on the
planet might expect that its grotesque absurdity would provoke enough
ridicule to cure it; but unfortunately quite the contrary happens.
Just as our ill health delivers us into the hands of medical quacks and
creates a passionate demand for impudent pretences that doctors can
cure the diseases they themselves die of daily, so our ignorance and
helplessness set us clamoring for spiritual and moral quacks who pretend
that they can save our souls from their own damnation. If a doctor were
to say to his patients, "I am familiar with your symptoms, because I
have seen other people in your condition; and I will bring the very
little knowledge we have to your treatment; but except in that very
shallow sense I dont know what is the matter with you; and I cant
undertake to cure you," he would be a lost man professionally; and if a
clergyman, on being called on to award a prize for good conduct in
the village school, were to say, "I am afraid I cannot say who is the
best-behaved child, because I really do not know what good conduct is;
but I will gladly take the teacher's word as to which child has
caused least inconvenience," he would probably be unfrocked, if not
excommunicated. And yet no honest and intellectually capable doctor or
parson can say more. Clearly it would not be wise of the doctor to say
it, because optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a
doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.
And a clergyman who is not prepared to lay down the law dogmatically
will not be of much use in a village school, though it behoves him all
the more to be very careful what law he lays down. But unless both the
clergyman and the doctor are in the attitude expressed by these speeches
they are not fit for their work. The man who believes that he has more
than a provisional hypothesis to go upon is a born fool. He may have
to act vigorously on it. The world has no use for the Agnostic who wont
believe anything because anything might be false, and wont deny anything
because anything might be true. But there is a wide difference between
saying, "I believe this; and I am going to act on it," or, "I dont
believe it; and I wont act on it," and saying, "It is true; and it is
my duty and yours to act on it," or, "It is false; and it is my duty
and yours to refuse to act on it." The difference is as great as that
between the Apostles' Creed and the Athanasian Creed. When you repeat
the Apostles' Creed you affirm that you believe certain things. There
you are clearly within your rights. When you repeat the Athanasian
Creed, you affirm that certain things are so, and that anybody who
doubts that they are so cannot be saved. And this is simply a piece of
impudence on your part, as you know nothing about it except that as good
men as you have never heard of your creed. The apostolic attitude is
a desire to convert others to our beliefs for the sake of sympathy and
light: the Athanasian attitude is a desire to murder people who dont
agree with us. I am sufficient of an Athanasian to advocate a law
for the speedy execution of all Athanasians, because they violate the
fundamental proposition of my creed, which is, I repeat, that all
living creatures are experiments. The precise formula for the Superman,
_ci-devant_ The Just Man Made Perfect, has not yet been discovered.
Until it is, every birth is an experiment in the Great Research which is
being conducted by the Life Force to discover that formula.




The Experiment Experimenting

And now all the modern schoolmaster abortionists will rise up beaming,
and say, "We quite agree. We regard every child in our school as a
subject for experiment. We are always experimenting with them. We
challenge the experimental test for our system. We are continually
guided by our experience in our great work of moulding the character of
our future citizens, etc. etc. etc." I am sorry to seem irreconcilable;
but it is the Life Force that has to make the experiment and not the
schoolmaster; and the Life Force for the child's purpose is in the child
and not in the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster is another experiment;
and a laboratory in which all the experiments began experimenting on one
another would not produce intelligible results. I admit, however, that
if my schoolmasters had treated me as an experiment of the Life Force:
that is, if they had set me free to do as I liked subject only to my
political rights and theirs, they could not have watched the experiment
very long, because the first result would have been a rapid movement
on my part in the direction of the door, and my disappearance
there-through.

It may be worth inquiring where I should have gone to. I should say that
practically every time I should have gone to a much more educational
place. I should have gone into the country, or into the sea, or into the
National Gallery, or to hear a band if there was one, or to any library
where there were no schoolbooks. I should have read very dry and
difficult books: for example, though nothing would have induced me
to read the budget of stupid party lies that served as a text-book of
history in school, I remember reading Robertson's Charles V. and his
history of Scotland from end to end most laboriously. Once, stung by the
airs of a schoolfellow who alleged that he had read Locke On The Human
Understanding, I attempted to read the Bible straight through, and
actually got to the Pauline Epistles before I broke down in disgust at
what seemed to me their inveterate crookedness of mind. If there had
been a school where children were really free, I should have had to
be driven out of it for the sake of my health by the teachers; for the
children to whom a literary education can be of any use are insatiable:
they will read and study far more than is good for them. In fact the
real difficulty is to prevent them from wasting their time by reading
for the sake of reading and studying for the sake of studying, instead
of taking some trouble to find out what they really like and are capable
of doing some good at. Some silly person will probably interrupt me
here with the remark that many children have no appetite for a literary
education at all, and would never open a book if they were not forced
to. I have known many such persons who have been forced to the point
of obtaining University degrees. And for all the effect their literary
exercises has left on them they might just as well have been put on the
treadmill. In fact they are actually less literate than the treadmill
would have left them; for they might by chance have picked up and dipped
into a volume of Shakespear or a translation of Homer if they had not
been driven to loathe every famous name in literature. I should probably
know as much Latin as French, if Latin had not been made the excuse for
my school imprisonment and degradation.




Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport

If we are to discuss the importance of art, learning, and intellectual
culture, the first thing we have to recognize is that we have very
little of them at present; and that this little has not been produced by
compulsory education: nay, that the scarcity is unnatural and has been
produced by the violent exclusion of art and artists from schools. On
the other hand we have quite a considerable degree of bodily culture:
indeed there is a continual outcry against the sacrifice of mental
accomplishments to athletics. In other words a sacrifice of the
professed object of compulsory education to the real object of voluntary
education. It is assumed that this means that people prefer bodily
to mental culture; but may it not mean that they prefer liberty and
satisfaction to coercion and privation. Why is it that people who have
been taught Shakespear as a school subject loathe his plays and cannot
by any means be persuaded ever to open his works after they escape from
school, whereas there is still, 300 years after his death, a wide and
steady sale for his works to people who read his plays as plays, and not
as task work? If Shakespear, or for that matter, Newton and Leibnitz,
are allowed to find their readers and students they will find them.
If their works are annotated and paraphrased by dullards, and the
annotations and paraphrases forced on all young people by imprisonment
and flogging and scolding, there will not be a single man of letters or
higher mathematician the more in the country: on the contrary there will
be less, as so many potential lovers of literature and mathematics will
have been incurably prejudiced against them. Everyone who is conversant
with the class in which child imprisonment and compulsory schooling is
carried out to the final extremity of the university degree knows that
its scholastic culture is a sham; that it knows little about literature
or art and a great deal about point-to-point races; and that the
village cobbler, who has never read a page of Plato, and is admittedly
a dangerously ignorant man politically, is nevertheless a Socrates
compared to the classically educated gentlemen who discuss politics in
country houses at election time (and at no other time) after their day's
earnest and skilful shooting. Think of the years and years of weary
torment the women of the piano-possessing class have been forced to
spend over the keyboard, fingering scales. How many of them could be
bribed to attend a pianoforte recital by a great player, though they
will rise from sick beds rather than miss Ascot or Goodwood?

Another familiar fact that teaches the same lesson is that many women
who have voluntarily attained a high degree of culture cannot add
up their own housekeeping books, though their education in simple
arithmetic was compulsory, whereas their higher education has been
wholly voluntary. Everywhere we find the same result. The imprisonment,
the beating, the taming and laming, the breaking of young spirits, the
arrest of development, the atrophy of all inhibitive power except the
power of fear, are real: the education is sham. Those who have been
taught most know least.




Antichrist

Among the worst effects of the unnatural segregation of children in
schools and the equally unnatural constant association of them with
adults in the family is the utter defeat of the vital element in
Christianity. Christ stands in the world for that intuition of the
highest humanity that we, being members one of another, must not
complain, must not scold, must not strike, nor revile nor persecute nor
revenge nor punish. Now family life and school life are, as far as the
moral training of children is concerned, nothing but the deliberate
inculcation of a routine of complaint, scolding, punishment,
persecution, and revenge as the natural and only possible way of dealing
with evil or inconvenience. "Aint nobody to be whopped for this here?"
exclaimed Sam Weller when he saw his employer's name written up on a
stage coach, and conceived the phenomenon as an insult which reflected
on himself. This exclamation of Sam Weller is at once the negation of
Christianity and the beginning and the end of current morality; and so
it will remain as long as the family and the school persist as we know
them: that is, as long as the rights of children are so utterly denied
that nobody will even take the trouble to ascertain what they are, and
coming of age is like the turning of a convict into the street after
twenty-one years penal servitude. Indeed it is worse; for the convict
may have learnt before his conviction how to live in freedom and may
remember how to set about it, however lamed his powers of freedom may
have become through disuse; but the child knows no other way of life but
the slave's way. Born free, as Rousseau says, he has been laid hands on
by slaves from the moment of his birth and brought up as a slave. How is
he, when he is at last set free, to be anything else than the slave he
actually is, clamoring for war, for the lash, for police, prisons, and
scaffolds in a wild panic of delusion that without these things he
is lost. The grown-up Englishman is to the end of his days a badly
brought-up child, beyond belief quarrelsome, petulant, selfish,
destructive, and cowardly: afraid that the Germans will come and enslave
him; that the burglar will come and rob him; that the bicycle or motor
car will run over him; that the smallpox will attack him; and that the
devil will run away with him and empty him out like a sack of coals on a
blazing fire unless his nurse or his parents or his schoolmaster or
his bishop or his judge or his army or his navy will do something to
frighten these bad things away. And this Englishman, without the moral
courage of a louse, will risk his neck for fun fifty times every winter
in the hunting field, and at Badajos sieges and the like will ram his
head into a hole bristling with sword blades rather than be beaten in
the one department in which he has been brought up to consult his own
honor. As a Sportsman (and war is fundamentally the sport of hunting
and fighting the most dangerous of the beasts of prey) he feels free. He
will tell you himself that the true sportsman is never a snob, a coward,
a duffer, a cheat, a thief, or a liar. Curious, is it not, that he has
not the same confidence in other sorts of man?

And even sport is losing its freedom. Soon everybody will be schooled,
mentally and physically, from the cradle to the end of the term of adult
compulsory military service, and finally of compulsory civil service
lasting until the age of superannuation. Always more schooling, more
compulsion. We are to be cured by an excess of the dose that has
poisoned us. Satan is to cast out Satan.




Under the Whip

Clearly this will not do. We must reconcile education with liberty.
We must find out some means of making men workers and, if need be,
warriors, without making them slaves. We must cultivate the noble
virtues that have their root in pride. Now no schoolmaster will teach
these any more than a prison governor will teach his prisoners how to
mutiny and escape. Self-preservation forces him to break the spirit
that revolts against him, and to inculcate submission, even to obscene
assault, as a duty. A bishop once had the hardihood to say that he would
rather see England free than England sober. Nobody has yet dared to say
that he would rather see an England of ignoramuses than an England of
cowards and slaves. And if anyone did, it would be necessary to point
out that the antithesis is not a practical one, as we have got at
present an England of ignoramuses who are also cowards and slaves, and
extremely proud of it at that, because in school they are taught to
submit, with what they ridiculously call Oriental fatalism (as if any
Oriental has ever submitted more helplessly and sheepishly to robbery
and oppression than we Occidentals do), to be driven day after day into
compounds and set to the tasks they loathe by the men they hate and
fear, as if this were the inevitable destiny of mankind. And naturally,
when they grow up, they helplessly exchange the prison of the school for
the prison of the mine or the workshop or the office, and drudge along
stupidly and miserably, with just enough gregarious instinct to turn
furiously on any intelligent person who proposes a change. It would be
quite easy to make England a paradise, according to our present ideas,
in a few years. There is no mystery about it: the way has been pointed
out over and over again. The difficulty is not the way but the will. And
we have no will because the first thing done with us in childhood was to
break our will. Can anything be more disgusting than the spectacle of a
nation reading the biography of Gladstone and gloating over the account
of how he was flogged at Eton, two of his schoolfellows being compelled
to hold him down whilst he was flogged. Not long ago a public body in
England had to deal with the case of a schoolmaster who, conceiving
himself insulted by the smoking of a cigaret against his orders by
a pupil eighteen years old, proposed to flog him publicly as a
satisfaction to what he called his honor and authority. I had intended
to give the particulars of this ease, but find the drudgery of repeating
such stuff too sickening, and the effect unjust to a man who was
doing only what others all over the country were doing as part of the
established routine of what is called education. The astounding part of
it was the manner in which the person to whom this outrage on decency
seemed quite proper and natural claimed to be a functionary of high
character, and had his claim allowed. In Japan he would hardly have been
allowed the privilege of committing suicide. What is to be said of a
profession in which such obscenities are made points of honor, or of
institutions in which they are an accepted part of the daily routine?
Wholesome people would not argue about the taste of such nastinesses:
they would spit them out; but we are tainted with flagellomania from
our childhood. When will we realize that the fact that we can become
accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary
for us to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to?
Before motor cars became common, necessity had accustomed us to a
foulness in our streets which would have horrified us had the street
been our drawing-room carpet. Before long we shall be as particular
about our streets as we now are about our carpets; and their condition
in the nineteenth century will become as forgotten and incredible as the
condition of the corridors of palaces and the courts of castles was as
late as the eighteenth century. This foulness, we can plead, was imposed
on us as a necessity by the use of horses and of huge retinues; but
flogging has never been so imposed: it has always been a vice, craved
for on any pretext by those depraved by it. Boys were flogged when
criminals were hanged, to impress the awful warning on them. Boys were
flogged at boundaries, to impress the boundaries on their memory. Other
methods and other punishments were always available: the choice of
this one betrayed the sensual impulse which makes the practice an
abomination. But when its viciousness made it customary, it was
practised and tolerated on all hands by people who were innocent of
anything worse than stupidity, ill temper, and inability to discover
other methods of maintaining order than those they had always seen
practised and approved of. From children and animals it extended to
slaves and criminals. In the days of Moses it was limited to 39 lashes.
In the early nineteenth century it had become an open madness: soldiers
were sentenced to a thousand lashes for trifling offences, with the
result (among others less mentionable) that the Iron Duke of Wellington
complained that it was impossible to get an order obeyed in the British
army except in two or three crack regiments. Such frantic excesses of
this disgusting neurosis provoked a reaction against it; but the clamor
for it by depraved persons never ceased, and was tolerated by a nation
trained to it from childhood in the schools until last year (1913), when
in what must be described as a paroxysm of sexual excitement provoked by
the agitation concerning the White Slave Traffic (the purely commercial
nature of which I was prevented from exposing on the stage by the
Censorship twenty years ago) the Government yielded to an outcry for
flagellation led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and passed an Act
under which a judge can sentence a man to be flogged to the utmost
extremity with any instrument usable for such a purpose that he cares
to prescribe. Such an Act is not a legislative phenomenon but a
psychopathic one. Its effect on the White Slave Traffic was, of course,
to distract public attention from its real cause and from the people who
really profit by it to imaginary "foreign scoundrels," and to secure a
monopoly of its organization for women.

And all this evil is made possible by the schoolmaster with his cane and
birch, by the parents getting rid as best they can of the nuisance of
children making noise and mischief in the house, and by the denial to
children of the elementary rights of human beings.

The first man who enslaved and "broke in" an animal with a whip would
have invented the explosion engine instead could he have foreseen the
curse he was laying on his race. For men and women learnt thereby to
enslave and break in their children by the same means. These children,
grown up, knew no other methods of training. Finally the evil that was
done for gain by the greedy was refined on and done for pleasure by the
lustful. Flogging has become a pleasure purchasable in our streets, and
inhibition a grown-up habit that children play at. "Go and see what baby
is doing; and tell him he mustnt" is the last word of the nursery; and
the grimmest aspect of it is that it was first formulated by a comic
paper as a capital joke.




Technical Instruction

Technical instruction tempts to violence (as a short cut) more
than liberal education. The sailor in Mr Rudyard Kipling's Captains
Courageous, teaching the boy the names of the ship's tackle with a
rope's end, does not disgust us as our schoolmasters do, especially as
the boy was a spoiled boy. But an unspoiled boy would not have needed
that drastic medicine. Technical training may be as tedious as learning
to skate or to play the piano or violin; but it is the price one must
pay to achieve certain desirable results or necessary ends. It is a
monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics
on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental
powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true; for there is no
labor that might not be imposed on a child or an adult on the same
pretext; but as a glance at the average products of our public school
and university education shews that it is not true, it need not trouble
us. But it is a fact that ignorance of Latin and Greek and mathematics
closes certain careers to men (I do not mean artificial, unnecessary,
noxious careers like those of the commercial schoolmaster). Languages,
even dead ones, have their uses; and, as it seems to many of us,
mathematics have their uses. They will always be learned by people who
want to learn them; and people will always want to learn them as long as
they are of any importance in life: indeed the want will survive their
importance: superstition is nowhere stronger than in the field of
obsolete acquirements. And they will never be learnt fruitfully by
people who do not want to learn them either for their own sake or for
use in necessary work. There is no harder schoolmaster than experience;
and yet experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn.

Still, one must not begin to apply this generalization too early.
And this brings me to an important factor in the case: the factor of
evolution.




Docility and Dependence

If anyone, impressed by my view that the rights of a child are precisely
those of an adult, proceeds to treat a child as if it were an adult, he
(or she) will find that though the plan will work much better at some
points than the usual plan, at others it will not work at all; and this
discovery may provoke him to turn back from the whole conception of
children's rights with a jest at the expense of bachelors' and old
maids' children. In dealing with children what is needed is not logic
but sense. There is no logical reason why young persons should be
allowed greater control of their property the day after they are
twenty-one than the day before it. There is no logical reason why I,
who strongly object to an adult standing over a boy of ten with a Latin
grammar, and saying, "you must learn this, whether you want to or not,"
should nevertheless be quite prepared to stand over a boy of five with
the multiplication table or a copy book or a code of elementary good
manners, and practice on his docility to make him learn them. And there
is no logical reason why I should do for a child a great many little
offices, some of them troublesome and disagreeable, which I should
not do for a boy twice its age, or support a boy or girl when I would
unhesitatingly throw an adult on his own resources. But there are
practical reasons, and sensible reasons, and affectionate reasons for
all these illogicalities. Children do not want to be treated altogether
as adults: such treatment terrifies them and over-burdens them with
responsibility. In truth, very few adults care to be called on for
independence and originality: they also are bewildered and terrified
in the absence of precedents and precepts and commandments; but modern
Democracy allows them a sanctioning and cancelling power if they are
capable of using it, which children are not. To treat a child wholly
as an adult would be to mock and destroy it. Infantile docility and
juvenile dependence are, like death, a product of Natural Selection;
and though there is no viler crime than to abuse them, yet there is no
greater cruelty than to ignore them. I have complained sufficiently
of what I suffered through the process of assault, imprisonment,
and compulsory lessons that taught me nothing, which are called my
schooling. But I could say a good deal also about the things I was not
taught and should have been taught, not to mention the things I was
allowed to do which I should not have been allowed to do. I have no
recollection of being taught to read or write; so I presume I was born
with both faculties; but many people seem to have bitter recollections
of being forced reluctantly to acquire them. And though I have the
uttermost contempt for a teacher so ill mannered and incompetent as to
be unable to make a child learn to read and write without also making it
cry, still I am prepared to admit that I had rather have been compelled
to learn to read and write with tears by an incompetent and ill mannered
person than left in ignorance. Reading, writing, and enough arithmetic
to use money honestly and accurately, together with the rudiments of law
and order, become necessary conditions of a child's liberty before it
can appreciate the importance of its liberty, or foresee that these
accomplishments are worth acquiring. Nature has provided for this by
evolving the instinct of docility. Children are very docile: they have
a sound intuition that they must do what they are told or perish. And
adults have an intuition, equally sound, that they must take advantage
of this docility to teach children how to live properly or the children
will not survive. The difficulty is to know where to stop. To illustrate
this, let us consider the main danger of childish docility and parental
officiousness.




The Abuse of Docility

Docility may survive as a lazy habit long after it has ceased to be a
beneficial instinct. If you catch a child when it is young enough to be
instinctively docile, and keep it in a condition of unremitted tutelage
under the nurserymaid, the governess, the preparatory school, the
secondary school, and the university, until it is an adult, you will
produce, not a self-reliant, free, fully matured human being, but a
grown-up schoolboy or schoolgirl, capable of nothing in the way of
original or independent action except outbursts of naughtiness in the
women and blackguardism in the men. That is exactly what we get at
present in our rich and consequently governing classes: they pass from
juvenility to senility without ever touching maturity except in body.
The classes which cannot afford this sustained tutelage are notably more
self-reliant and grown-up: an office boy of fifteen is often more of a
man than a university student of twenty. Unfortunately this precocity
is disabled by poverty, ignorance, narrowness, and a hideous power of
living without art or love or beauty and being rather proud of it. The
poor never escape from servitude: their docility is preserved by their
slavery. And so all become the prey of the greedy, the selfish, the
domineering, the unscrupulous, the predatory. If here and there an
individual refuses to be docile, ten docile persons will beat him or
lock him up or shoot him or hang him at the bidding of his oppressors
and their own. The crux of the whole difficulty about parents,
schoolmasters, priests, absolute monarchs, and despots of every sort,
is the tendency to abuse natural docility. A nation should always be
healthily rebellious; but the king or prime minister has yet to be found
who will make trouble by cultivating that side of the national spirit. A
child should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself more
and more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and
conduct; yet as nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppish
child, it is useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcate
this uppishness. Such unamiable precepts as Always contradict an
authoritative statement, Always return a blow, Never lose a chance of a
good fight, When you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who scolds
you whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose, and follow the
question with a blow or an insult or some other unmistakable expression
of resentment, Remember that the progress of the world depends on your
knowing better than your elders, are just as important as those of The
Sermon on the Mount; but no one has yet seen them written up in letters
of gold in a schoolroom or nursery. The child is taught to be kind, to
be respectful, to be quiet, not to answer back, to be truthful when its
elders want to find out anything from it, to lie when the truth would
shock or hurt its elders, to be above all things obedient, and to be
seen and not heard. Here we have two sets of precepts, each warranted
to spoil a child hopelessly if the other be omitted. Unfortunately we
do not allow fair play between them. The rebellious, intractable,
aggressive, selfish set provoke a corrective resistance, and do not
pretend to high moral or religious sanctions; and they are never urged
by grown-up people on young people. They are therefore more in danger
of neglect or suppression than the other set, which have all the adults,
all the laws, all the religions on their side. How is the child to be
secured its due share of both bodies of doctrine?




The Schoolboy and the Homeboy

In practice what happens is that parents notice that boys brought up at
home become mollycoddles, or prigs, or duffers, unable to take care of
themselves. They see that boys should learn to rough it a little and
to mix with children of their own age. This is natural enough. When you
have preached at and punished a boy until he is a moral cripple, you
are as much hampered by him as by a physical cripple; and as you do not
intend to have him on your hands all your life, and are generally rather
impatient for the day when he will earn his own living and leave you to
attend to yourself, you sooner or later begin to talk to him about the
need for self-reliance, learning to think, and so forth, with the result
that your victim, bewildered by your inconsistency, concludes that there
is no use trying to please you, and falls into an attitude of sulky
resentment. Which is an additional inducement to pack him off to school.

In school, he finds himself in a dual world, under two dispensations.
There is the world of the boys, where the point of honor is to be
untameable, always ready to fight, ruthless in taking the conceit out of
anyone who ventures to give himself airs of superior knowledge or taste,
and generally to take Lucifer for one's model. And there is the world of
the masters, the world of discipline, submission, diligence, obedience,
and continual and shameless assumption of moral and intellectual
authority. Thus the schoolboy hears both sides, and is so far better
off than the homebred boy who hears only one. But the two sides are
not fairly presented. They are presented as good and evil, as vice and
virtue, as villainy and heroism. The boy feels mean and cowardly when
he obeys, and selfish and rascally when he disobeys. He looses his moral
courage just as he comes to hate books and languages. In the end, John
Ruskin, tied so close to his mother's apron-string that he did not
escape even when he went to Oxford, and John Stuart Mill, whose father
ought to have been prosecuted for laying his son's childhood waste with
lessons, were superior, as products of training, to our schoolboys. They
were very conspicuously superior in moral courage; and though they did
not distinguish themselves at cricket and football, they had quite as
much physical hardihood as any civilized man needs. But it is to be
observed that Ruskin's parents were wise people who gave John a full
share in their own life, and put up with his presence both at home and
abroad when they must sometimes have been very weary of him; and Mill,
as it happens, was deliberately educated to challenge all the most
sacred institutions of his country. The households they were brought
up in were no more average households than a Montessori school is an
average school.




The Comings of Age of Children

All this inculcated adult docility, which wrecks every civilization as
it is wrecking ours, is inhuman and unnatural. We must reconsider our
institution of the Coming of Age, which is too late for some purposes,
and too early for others. There should be a series of Coming of Ages for
every individual. The mammals have their first coming of age when they
are weaned; and it is noteworthy that this rather cruel and selfish
operation on the part of the parent has to be performed resolutely, with
claws and teeth; for your little mammal does not want to be weaned, and
yields only to a pretty rough assertion of the right of the parent to
be relieved of the child as soon as the child is old enough to bear the
separation. The same thing occurs with children: they hang on to the
mother's apron-string and the father's coat tails as long as they can,
often baffling those sensitive parents who know that children should
think for themselves and fend for themselves, but are too kind to throw
them on their own resources with the ferocity of the domestic cat. The
child should have its first coming of age when it is weaned, another
when it can talk, another when it can walk, another when it can dress
itself without assistance; and when it can read, write, count money, and
pass an examination in going a simple errand involving a purchase and
a journey by rail or other public method of locomotion, it should have
quite a majority. At present the children of laborers are soon mobile
and able to shift for themselves, whereas it is possible to find
grown-up women in the rich classes who are actually afraid to take a
walk in the streets unattended and unprotected. It is true that this
is a superstition from the time when a retinue was part of the state
of persons of quality, and the unattended person was supposed to be a
common person of no quality, earning a living; but this has now become
so absurd that children and young women are no longer told why they are
forbidden to go about alone, and have to be persuaded that the streets
are dangerous places, which of course they are; but people who are not
educated to live dangerously have only half a life, and are more likely
to die miserably after all than those who have taken all the common
risks of freedom from their childhood onward as matters of course.




The Conflict of Wills

The world wags in spite of its schools and its families because both
schools and families are mostly very largely anarchic: parents and
schoolmasters are good-natured or weak or lazy; and children are docile
and affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits of naughtiness; and
so most families slummock along and muddle through until the children
cease to be children. In the few cases when the parties are energetic
and determined, the child is crushed or the parent is reduced to a
cipher, as the case may be. When the opposed forces are neither of them
strong enough to annihilate the other, there is serious trouble: that
is how we get those feuds between parent and child which recur to our
memory so ironically when we hear people sentimentalizing about natural
affection. We even get tragedies; for there is nothing so tragic to
contemplate or so devastating to suffer as the oppression of will
without conscience; and the whole tendency of our family and school
system is to set the will of the parent and the school despot above
conscience as something that must be deferred to abjectly and absolutely
for its own sake.

The strongest, fiercest force in nature is human will. It is the highest
organization we know of the will that has created the whole universe.
Now all honest civilization, religion, law, and convention is an attempt
to keep this force within beneficent bounds. What corrupts civilization,
religion, law, and convention (and they are at present pretty nearly
as corrupt as they dare) is the constant attempts made by the wills of
individuals and classes to thwart the wills and enslave the powers
of other individuals and classes. The powers of the parent and the
schoolmaster, and of their public analogues the lawgiver and the
judge, become instruments of tyranny in the hands of those who are too
narrow-minded to understand law and exercise judgment; and in their
hands (with us they mostly fall into such hands) law becomes tyranny.
And what is a tyrant? Quite simply a person who says to another person,
young or old, "You shall do as I tell you; you shall make what I want;
you shall profess my creed; you shall have no will of your own; and
your powers shall be at the disposal of my will." It has come to this at
last: that the phrase "she has a will of her own," or "he has a will
of his own" has come to denote a person of exceptional obstinacy and
self-assertion. And even persons of good natural disposition, if
brought up to expect such deference, are roused to unreasoning fury,
and sometimes to the commission of atrocious crimes, by the slightest
challenge to their authority. Thus a laborer may be dirty, drunken,
untruthful, slothful, untrustworthy in every way without exhausting the
indulgence of the country house. But let him dare to be "disrespectful"
and he is a lost man, though he be the cleanest, soberest, most
diligent, most veracious, most trustworthy man in the county. Dickens's
instinct for detecting social cankers never served him better than when
he shewed us Mrs Heep teaching her son to "be umble," knowing that if he
carried out that precept he might be pretty well anything else he liked.
The maintenance of deference to our wills becomes a mania which will
carry the best of us to any extremity. We will allow a village of
Egyptian fellaheen or Indian tribesmen to live the lowest life they
please among themselves without molestation; but let one of them slay
an Englishman or even strike him on the strongest provocation, and
straightway we go stark mad, burning and destroying, shooting and
shelling, flogging and hanging, if only such survivors as we may leave
are thoroughly cowed in the presence of a man with a white face. In
the committee room of a local council or city corporation, the humblest
employees of the committee find defenders if they complain of harsh
treatment. Gratuities are voted, indulgences and holidays are pleaded
for, delinquencies are excused in the most sentimental manner provided
only the employee, however patent a hypocrite or incorrigible a slacker,
is hat in hand. But let the most obvious measure of justice be demanded
by the secretary of a Trade Union in terms which omit all expressions
of subservience, and it is with the greatest difficulty that the
cooler-headed can defeat angry motions that the letter be thrown into
the waste paper basket and the committee proceed to the next business.




The Demagogue's Opportunity

And the employee has in him the same fierce impulse to impose his will
without respect for the will of others. Democracy is in practice nothing
but a device for cajoling from him the vote he refuses to arbitrary
authority. He will not vote for Coriolanus; but when an experienced
demagogue comes along and says, "Sir: _you_ are the dictator: the
voice of the people is the voice of God; and I am only your very humble
servant," he says at once, "All right: tell me what to dictate," and
is presently enslaved more effectually with his own silly consent than
Coriolanus would ever have enslaved him without asking his leave. And
the trick by which the demagogue defeats Coriolanus is played on him in
his turn by _his_ inferiors. Everywhere we see the cunning succeeding
in the world by seeking a rich or powerful master and practising on his
lust for subservience. The political adventurer who gets into parliament
by offering himself to the poor voter, not as his representative but as
his will-less soulless "delegate," is himself the dupe of a clever wife
who repudiates Votes for Women, knowing well that whilst the man is
master, the man's mistress will rule. Uriah Heep may be a crawling
creature; but his crawling takes him upstairs.

Thus does the selfishness of the will turn on itself, and obtain by
flattery what it cannot seize by open force. Democracy becomes the
latest trick of tyranny: "womanliness" becomes the latest wile of
prostitution.

Between parent and child the same conflict wages and the same
destruction of character ensues. Parents set themselves to bend the will
of their children to their own--to break their stubborn spirit, as
they call it--with the ruthlessness of Grand Inquisitors. Cunning,
unscrupulous children learn all the arts of the sneak in circumventing
tyranny: children of better character are cruelly distressed and more or
less lamed for life by it.




Our Quarrelsomeness

As between adults, we find a general quarrelsomeness which makes
political reform as impossible to most Englishmen as to hogs. Certain
sections of the nation get cured of this disability. University men,
sailors, and politicians are comparatively free from it, because the
communal life of the University, the fact that in a ship a man must
either learn to consider others or else go overboard or into irons, and
the habit of working on committees and ceasing to expect more of
one's own way than is included in the greatest common measure of the
committee, educate the will socially. But no one who has ever had to
guide a committee of ordinary private Englishmen through their first
attempts at collective action, in committee or otherwise, can retain
any illusions as to the appalling effects on our national manners
and character of the organization of the home and the school as petty
tyrannies, and the absence of all teaching of self-respect and training
in self-assertion. Bullied and ordered about, the Englishman obeys like
a sheep, evades like a knave, or tries to murder his oppressor. Merely
criticized or opposed in committee, or invited to consider anybody's
views but his own, he feels personally insulted and wants to resign
or leave the room unless he is apologized to. And his panic and
bewilderment when he sees that the older hands at the work have no
patience with him and do not intend to treat him as infallible, are
pitiable as far as they are anything but ludicrous. That is what comes
of not being taught to consider other people's wills, and left to submit
to them or to over-ride them as if they were the winds and the weather.
Such a state of mind is incompatible not only with the democratic
introduction of high civilization, but with the comprehension and
maintenance of such civilized institutions as have been introduced by
benevolent and intelligent despots and aristocrats.




We Must Reform Society before we can Reform Ourselves

When we come to the positive problem of what to do with children if we
are to give up the established plan, we find the difficulties so great
that we begin to understand why so many people who detest the system and
look back with loathing on their own schooldays, must helplessly send
their children to the very schools they themselves were sent to, because
there is no alternative except abandoning the children to undisciplined
vagabondism. Man in society must do as everybody else does in his class:
only fools and romantic novices imagine that freedom is a mere matter of
the readiness of the individual to snap his fingers at convention. It
is true that most of us live in a condition of quite unnecessary
inhibition, wearing ugly and uncomfortable clothes, making ourselves and
other people miserable by the heathen horrors of mourning, staying away
from the theatre because we cannot afford the stalls and are ashamed
to go to the pit, and in dozens of other ways enslaving ourselves
when there are comfortable alternatives open to us without any real
drawbacks. The contemplation of these petty slaveries, and of the
triumphant ease with which sensible people throw them off, creates an
impression that if we only take Johnson's advice to free our minds from
cant, we can achieve freedom. But if we all freed our minds from cant
we should find that for the most part we should have to go on doing
the necessary work of the world exactly as we did it before until we
organized new and free methods of doing it. Many people believed in
secondary co-education (boys and girls taught together) before schools
like Bedales were founded: indeed the practice was common enough in
elementary schools and in Scotland; but their belief did not help them
until Bedales and St George's were organized; and there are still not
nearly enough co-educational schools in existence to accommodate all
the children of the parents who believe in co-education up to university
age, even if they could always afford the fees of these exceptional
schools. It may be edifying to tell a duke that our public schools are
all wrong in their constitution and methods, or a costermonger that
children should be treated as in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister instead of as
they are treated at the elementary school at the corner of his street;
but what are the duke and the coster to do? Neither of them has any
effective choice in the matter: their children must either go to the
schools that are, or to no school at all. And as the duke thinks with
reason that his son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does
not go to school, and the coster knows that his son will become an
illiterate hooligan if he is left to the streets, there is no real
alternative for either of them. Child life must be socially organized:
no parent, rich or poor, can choose institutions that do not exist; and
the private enterprise of individual school masters appealing to a
group of well-to-do parents, though it may shew what can be done by
enthusiasts with new methods, cannot touch the mass of our children.
For the average parent or child nothing is really available except the
established practice; and this is what makes it so important that the
established practice should be a sound one, and so useless for clever
individuals to disparage it unless they can organize an alternative
practice and make it, too, general.




The Pursuit of Manners

If you cross-examine the duke and the coster, you will find that they
are not concerned for the scholastic attainments of their children.
Ask the duke whether he could pass the standard examination of
twelve-year-old children in elementary schools, and he will admit,
with an entirely placid smile, that he would almost certainly be
ignominiously plucked. And he is so little ashamed of or disadvantaged
by his condition that he is not prepared to spend an hour in remedying
it. The coster may resent the inquiry instead of being amused by it;
but his answer, if true, will be the same. What they both want for their
children is the communal training, the apprenticeship to society, the
lessons in holding one's own among people of all sorts with whom one is
not, as in the home, on privileged terms. These can be acquired only by
"mixing with the world," no matter how wicked the world is. No parent
cares twopence whether his children can write Latin hexameters or
repeat the dates of the accession of all the English monarchs since the
Conqueror; but all parents are earnestly anxious about the manners of
their children. Better Claude Duval than Kaspar Hauser. Laborers who are
contemptuously anti-clerical in their opinions will send their
daughters to the convent school because the nuns teach them some sort
of gentleness of speech and behavior. And peers who tell you that our
public schools are rotten through and through, and that our Universities
ought to be razed to the foundations, send their sons to Eton and
Oxford, Harrow and Cambridge, not only because there is nothing else to
be done, but because these places, though they turn out blackguards
and ignoramuses and boobies galore, turn them out with the habits and
manners of the society they belong to. Bad as those manners are in many
respects, they are better than no manners at all. And no individual or
family can possibly teach them. They can be acquired only by living in
an organized community in which they are traditional.

Thus we see that there are reasons for the segregation of children even
in families where the great reason: namely, that children are nuisances
to adults, does not press very hardly, as, for instance, in the houses
of the very poor, who can send their children to play in the streets,
or the houses of the very rich, which are so large that the children's
quarters can be kept out of the parents' way like the servants'
quarters.




Not too much Wind on the Heath, Brother

What, then, is to be done? For the present, unfortunately, little except
propagating the conception of Children's Rights. Only the achievement
of economic equality through Socialism can make it possible to deal
thoroughly with the question from the point of view of the total
interest of the community, which must always consist of grown-up
children. Yet economic equality, like all simple and obvious
arrangements, seems impossible to people brought up as children are now.
Still, something can be done even within class limits. Large communities
of children of the same class are possible today; and voluntary
organization of outdoor life for children has already begun in Boy
Scouting and excursions of one kind or another. The discovery that
anything, even school life, is better for the child than home life,
will become an over-ridden hobby; and we shall presently be told by our
faddists that anything, even camp life, is better than school life.
Some blundering beginnings of this are already perceptible. There is a
movement for making our British children into priggish little barefooted
vagabonds, all talking like that born fool George Borrow, and supposed
to be splendidly healthy because they would die if they slept in rooms
with the windows shut, or perhaps even with a roof over their heads.
Still, this is a fairly healthy folly; and it may do something to
establish Mr Harold Cox's claim of a Right to Roam as the basis of a
much needed law compelling proprietors of land to provide plenty of
gates in their fences, and to leave them unlocked when there are no
growing crops to be damaged nor bulls to be encountered, instead of, as
at present, imprisoning the human race in dusty or muddy thoroughfares
between walls of barbed wire.

The reaction against vagabondage will come from the children themselves.
For them freedom will not mean the expensive kind of savagery now called
"the simple life." Their natural disgust with the visions of cockney
book fanciers blowing themselves out with "the wind on the heath,
brother," and of anarchists who are either too weak to understand that
men are strong and free in proportion to the social pressure they
can stand and the complexity of the obligations they are prepared to
undertake, or too strong to realize that what is freedom to them may be
terror and bewilderment to others, will drive them back to the home and
the school if these have meanwhile learned the lesson that children are
independent human beings and have rights.




Wanted: a Child's Magna Charta

Whether we shall presently be discussing a Juvenile Magna Charta or
Declaration of Rights by way of including children in the Constitution
is a question on which I leave others to speculate. But if it could
once be established that a child has an adult's Right of Egress from
uncomfortable places and unpleasant company, and there were children's
lawyers to sue pedagogues and others for assault and imprisonment, there
would be an amazing change in the behavior of schoolmasters, the quality
of school books, and the amenities of school life. That Consciousness of
Consent which, even in its present delusive form, has enabled Democracy
to oust tyrannical systems in spite of all its vulgarities and
stupidities and rancors and ineptitudes and ignorances, would operate as
powerfully among children as it does now among grown-ups. No doubt the
pedagogue would promptly turn demagogue, and woo his scholars by all the
arts of demagogy; but none of these arts can easily be so dishonorable
or mischievous as the art of caning. And, after all, if larger liberties
are attached to the acquisition of knowledge, and the child finds
that it can no more go to the seaside without a knowledge of the
multiplication and pence tables than it can be an astronomer without
mathematics, it will learn the multiplication table, which is more than
it always does at present, in spite of all the canings and keepings in.




The Pursuit of Learning

When the Pursuit of Learning comes to mean the pursuit of learning by
the child instead of the pursuit of the child by Learning, cane in
hand, the danger will be precocity of the intellect, which is just as
undesirable as precocity of the emotions. We still have a silly habit of
talking and thinking as if intellect were a mechanical process and not a
passion; and in spite of the German tutors who confess openly that three
out of every five of the young men they coach for examinations are lamed
for life thereby; in spite of Dickens and his picture of little Paul
Dombey dying of lessons, we persist in heaping on growing children and
adolescent youths and maidens tasks Pythagoras would have declined out
of common regard for his own health and common modesty as to his own
capacity. And this overwork is not all the effect of compulsion; for
the average schoolmaster does not compel his scholars to learn: he only
scolds and punishes them if they do not, which is quite a different
thing, the net effect being that the school prisoners need not learn
unless they like. Nay, it is sometimes remarked that the school
dunce--meaning the one who does not like--often turns out well
afterwards, as if idleness were a sign of ability and character. A much
more sensible explanation is that the so-called dunces are not exhausted
before they begin the serious business of life. It is said that boys
will be boys; and one can only add one wishes they would. Boys really
want to be manly, and are unfortunately encouraged thoughtlessly in this
very dangerous and overstraining aspiration. All the people who have
really worked (Herbert Spencer for instance) warn us against work as
earnestly as some people warn us against drink. When learning is placed
on the voluntary footing of sport, the teacher will find himself saying
every day "Run away and play: you have worked as much as is good for
you." Trying to make children leave school will be like trying to make
them go to bed; and it will be necessary to surprise them with the idea
that teaching is work, and that the teacher is tired and must go play or
rest or eat: possibilities always concealed by that infamous humbug
the current schoolmaster, who achieves a spurious divinity and a witch
doctor's authority by persuading children that he is not human, just as
ladies persuade them that they have no legs.




Children and Game: a Proposal

Of the many wild absurdities of our existing social order perhaps the
most grotesque is the costly and strictly enforced reservation of large
tracts of country as deer forests and breeding grounds for pheasants
whilst there is so little provision of the kind made for children.
I have more than once thought of trying to introduce the shooting
of children as a sport, as the children would then be preserved very
carefully for ten months in the year, thereby reducing their death rate
far more than the fusillades of the sportsmen during the other two would
raise it. At present the killing of a fox except by a pack of foxhounds
is regarded with horror; but you may and do kill children in a hundred
and fifty ways provided you do not shoot them or set a pack of dogs on
them. It must be admitted that the foxes have the best of it; and indeed
a glance at our pheasants, our deer, and our children will convince the
most sceptical that the children have decidedly the worst of it.

This much hope, however, can be extracted from the present state of
things. It is so fantastic, so mad, so apparently impossible, that no
scheme of reform need ever henceforth be discredited on the ground that
it is fantastic or mad or apparently impossible. It is the sensible
schemes, unfortunately, that are hopeless in England. Therefore I have
great hopes that my own views, though fundamentally sensible, can be
made to appear fantastic enough to have a chance.

First, then, I lay it down as a prime condition of sane society, obvious
as such to anyone but an idiot, that in any decent community, children
should find in every part of their native country, food, clothing,
lodging, instruction, and parental kindness for the asking. For the
matter of that, so should adults; but the two cases differ in that as
these commodities do not grow on the bushes, the adults cannot have
them unless they themselves organize and provide the supply, whereas the
children must have them as if by magic, with nothing to do but rub the
lamp, like Aladdin, and have their needs satisfied.




The Parents' Intolerable Burden

There is nothing new in this: it is how children have always had and
must always have their needs satisfied. The parent has to play the part
of Aladdin's djinn; and many a parent has sunk beneath the burden of
this service. All the novelty we need is to organize it so that instead
of the individual child fastening like a parasite on its own particular
parents, the whole body of children should be thrown not only upon the
whole body of parents, but upon the celibates and childless as well,
whose present exemption from a full share in the social burden of
children is obviously unjust and unwholesome. Today it is easy to find a
widow who has at great cost to herself in pain, danger, and disablement,
borne six or eight children. In the same town you will find rich
bachelors and old maids, and married couples with no children or with
families voluntarily limited to two or three. The eight children do not
belong to the woman in any real or legal sense. When she has reared
them they pass away from her into the community as independent persons,
marrying strangers, working for strangers, spending on the community the
life that has been built up at her expense. No more monstrous injustice
could be imagined than that the burden of rearing the children should
fall on her alone and not on the celibates and the selfish as well.

This is so far recognized that already the child finds, wherever it
goes, a school for it, and somebody to force it into the school; and
more and more these schools are being driven by the mere logic of facts
to provide the children with meals, with boots, with spectacles, with
dentists and doctors. In fact, when the child's parents are destitute or
not to be found, bread, lodging, and clothing are provided. It is true
that they are provided grudgingly and on conditions infamous enough to
draw down abundant fire from Heaven upon us every day in the shape of
crime and disease and vice; but still the practice of keeping children
barely alive at the charge of the community is established; and there is
no need for me to argue about it. I propose only two extensions of the
practice. One is to provide for all the child's reasonable human wants,
on which point, if you differ from me, I shall take leave to say that
you are socially a fool and personally an inhuman wretch. The other is
that these wants should be supplied in complete freedom from compulsory
schooling or compulsory anything except restraint from crime, though,
as they can be supplied only by social organization, the child must be
conscious of and subject to the conditions of that organization, which
may involve such portions of adult responsibility and duty as a child
may be able to bear according to its age, and which will in any case
prevent it from forming the vagabond and anarchist habit of mind.

One more exception might be necessary: compulsory freedom. I am sure
that a child should not be imprisoned in a school. I am not so sure that
it should not sometimes be driven out into the open--imprisoned in the
woods and on the mountains, as it were. For there are frowsty children,
just as there are frowsty adults, who dont want freedom. This morbid
result of over-domestication would, let us hope, soon disappear with its
cause.




Mobilization

Those who see no prospect held out to them by this except a country in
which all the children shall be roaming savages, should consider, first,
whether their condition would be any worse than that of the little caged
savages of today, and second, whether either children or adults are
so apt to run wild that it is necessary to tether them fast to one
neighborhood to prevent a general dissolution of society. My own
observation leads me to believe that we are not half mobilized enough.
True, I cannot deny that we are more mobile than we were. You will still
find in the home counties old men who have never been to London, and who
tell you that they once went to Winchester or St Albans much as if they
had been to the South Pole; but they are not so common as the clerk who
has been to Paris or to Lovely Lucerne, and who "goes away somewhere"
when he has a holiday. His grandfather never had a holiday, and, if he
had, would no more have dreamed of crossing the Channel than of taking
a box at the Opera. But with all allowance for the Polytechnic excursion
and the tourist agency, our inertia is still appalling. I confess to
having once spent nine years in London without putting my nose
outside it; and though this was better, perhaps, than the restless
globe-trotting vagabondage of the idle rich, wandering from hotel to
hotel and never really living anywhere, yet I should no more have done
it if I had been properly mobilized in my childhood than I should have
worn the same suit of clothes all that time (which, by the way, I very
nearly did, my professional income not having as yet begun to sprout).
There are masses of people who could afford at least a trip to Margate,
and a good many who could afford a trip round the world, who are more
immovable than Aldgate pump. To others, who would move if they knew how,
travelling is surrounded with imaginary difficulties and terrors. In
short, the difficulty is not to fix people, but to root them up. We keep
repeating the silly proverb that a rolling stone gathers no moss, as if
moss were a desirable parasite. What we mean is that a vagabond does not
prosper. Even this is not true, if prosperity means enjoyment as well as
responsibility and money. The real misery of vagabondage is the misery
of having nothing to do and nowhere to go, the misery of being derelict
of God and Man, the misery of the idle, poor or rich. And this is one
of the miseries of unoccupied childhood. The unoccupied adult, thus
afflicted, tries many distractions which are, to say the least, unsuited
to children. But one of them, the distraction of seeing the world, is
innocent and beneficial. Also it is childish, being a continuation of
what nurses call "taking notice," by which a child becomes experienced.
It is pitiable nowadays to see men and women doing after the age of 45
all the travelling and sightseeing they should have done before they
were 15. Mere wondering and staring at things is an important part of
a child's education: that is why children can be thoroughly mobilized
without making vagabonds of them. A vagabond is at home nowhere because
he wanders: a child should wander because it ought to be at home
everywhere. And if it has its papers and its passports, and gets what
it requires not by begging and pilfering, but from responsible agents
of the community as of right, and with some formal acknowledgment of
the obligations it is incurring and a knowledge of the fact that these
obligations are being recorded: if, further, certain qualifications are
exacted before it is promoted from permission to go as far as its
legs will carry it to using mechanical aids to locomotion, it can roam
without much danger of gypsification.

Under such circumstances the boy or girl could always run away, and
never be lost; and on no other conditions can a child be free without
being also a homeless outcast.

Parents could also run away from disagreeable children or drive them out
of doors or even drop their acquaintance, temporarily or permanently,
without inhumanity. Thus both parties would be on their good behavior,
and not, as at present, on their filial or parental behavior, which,
like all unfree behavior, is mostly bad behavior.

As to what other results might follow, we had better wait and see; for
nobody now alive can imagine what customs and institutions would grow
up in societies of free children. Child laws and child fashions, child
manners and child morals are now not tolerated; but among free children
there would certainly be surprising developments in this direction. I do
not think there would be any danger of free children behaving as badly
as grown-up people do now because they have never been free. They could
hardly behave worse, anyhow.




Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs

A very distinguished man once assured a mother of my acquaintance that
she would never know what it meant to be hurt until she was hurt through
her children. Children are extremely cruel without intending it; and
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they do not
conceive their elders as having any human feelings. Serve the elders
right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of the impostor
is not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but that he is taken
for what he pretends to be, and treated as such. And to be treated as
anything but what you really are may seem pleasant to the imagination
when the treatment is above your merits; but in actual experience it
is often quite the reverse. When I was a very small boy, my romantic
imagination, stimulated by early doses of fiction, led me to brag to a
still smaller boy so outrageously that he, being a simple soul, really
believed me to be an invincible hero. I cannot remember whether this
pleased me much; but I do remember very distinctly that one day this
admirer of mine, who had a pet goat, found the animal in the hands of a
larger boy than either of us, who mocked him and refused to restore the
animal to his rightful owner. Whereupon, naturally, he came weeping
to me, and demanded that I should rescue the goat and annihilate the
aggressor. My terror was beyond description: fortunately for me, it
imparted such a ghastliness to my voice and aspect as I under the eye of
my poor little dupe, advanced on the enemy with that hideous extremity
of cowardice which is called the courage of despair, and said "You let
go that goat," that he abandoned his prey and fled, to my unforgettable,
unspeakable relief. I have never since exaggerated my prowess in bodily
combat.

Now what happened to me in the adventure of the goat happens very often
to parents, and would happen to schoolmasters if the prison door of the
school did not shut out the trials of life. I remember once, at school,
the resident head master was brought down to earth by the sudden illness
of his wife. In the confusion that ensued it became necessary to
leave one of the schoolrooms without a master. I was in the class that
occupied that schoolroom. To have sent us home would have been to break
the fundamental bargain with our parents by which the school was bound
to keep us out of their way for half the day at all hazards. Therefore
an appeal had to be made to our better feelings: that is, to our common
humanity, not to make a noise. But the head master had never admitted
any common humanity with us. We had been carefully broken in to regard
him as a being quite aloof from and above us: one not subject to error
or suffering or death or illness or mortality. Consequently sympathy was
impossible; and if the unfortunate lady did not perish, it was because,
as I now comfort myself with guessing, she was too much pre-occupied
with her own pains, and possibly making too much noise herself, to be
conscious of the pandemonium downstairs.

A great deal of the fiendishness of schoolboys and the cruelty of
children to their elders is produced just in this way. Elders cannot be
superhuman beings and suffering fellow-creatures at the same time. If
you pose as a little god, you must pose for better for worse.




How Little We Know About Our Parents

The relation between parent and child has cruel moments for the parent
even when money is no object, and the material worries are delegated to
servants and school teachers. The child and the parent are strangers
to one another necessarily, because their ages must differ widely. Read
Goethe's autobiography; and note that though he was happy in his
parents and had exceptional powers of observation, divination, and
story-telling, he knew less about his father and mother than about most
of the other people he mentions. I myself was never on bad terms with
my mother: we lived together until I was forty-two years old, absolutely
without the smallest friction of any kind; yet when her death set me
thinking curiously about our relations, I realized that I knew very
little about her. Introduce me to a strange woman who was a child when
I was a child, a girl when I was a boy, an adolescent when I was an
adolescent; and if we take naturally to one another I will know more of
her and she of me at the end of forty days (I had almost said of
forty minutes) than I knew of my mother at the end of forty years. A
contemporary stranger is a novelty and an enigma, also a possibility;
but a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it
does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned:
the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is
beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact
in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and
weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning. If
I meet a widow I may ask her all about her marriage; but what son ever
dreams of asking his mother about her marriage, or could endure to hear
of it without violently breaking off the old sacred relationship between
them, and ceasing to be her child or anything more to her than the first
man in the street might be?

Yet though in this sense the child cannot realize its parent's
humanity, the parent can realize the child's; for the parents with their
experience of life have none of the illusions about the child that the
child has about the parents; and the consequence is that the child
can hurt its parents' feelings much more than its parents can hurt
the child's, because the child, even when there has been none of the
deliberate hypocrisy by which children are taken advantage of by their
elders, cannot conceive the parent as a fellow-creature, whilst the
parents know very well that the children are only themselves over again.
The child cannot conceive that its blame or contempt or want of interest
could possibly hurt its parent, and therefore expresses them all with
an indifference which has given rise to the term _enfant terrible_ (a
tragic term in spite of the jests connected with it); whilst the parent
can suffer from such slights and reproaches more from a child than from
anyone else, even when the child is not beloved, because the child is so
unmistakably sincere in them.




Our Abandoned Mothers

Take a very common instance of this agonizing incompatibility. A widow
brings up her son to manhood. He meets a strange woman, and goes off
with and marries her, leaving his mother desolate. It does not occur to
him that this is at all hard on her: he does it as a matter of course,
and actually expects his mother to receive, on terms of special
affection, the woman for whom she has been abandoned. If he shewed any
sense of what he was doing, any remorse; if he mingled his tears with
hers and asked her not to think too hardly of him because he had obeyed
the inevitable destiny of a man to leave his father and mother and
cleave to his wife, she could give him her blessing and accept her
bereavement with dignity and without reproach. But the man never dreams
of such considerations. To him his mother's feeling in the matter, when
she betrays it, is unreasonable, ridiculous, and even odious, as shewing
a prejudice against his adorable bride.

I have taken the widow as an extreme and obvious case; but there are
many husbands and wives who are tired of their consorts, or disappointed
in them, or estranged from them by infidelities; and these parents, in
losing a son or a daughter through marriage, may be losing everything
they care for. No parent's love is as innocent as the love of a child:
the exclusion of all conscious sexual feeling from it does not exclude
the bitterness, jealousy, and despair at loss which characterize sexual
passion: in fact, what is called a pure love may easily be more selfish
and jealous than a carnal one. Anyhow, it is plain matter of fact that
naively selfish people sometimes try with fierce jealousy to prevent
their children marrying.




Family Affection

Until the family as we know it ceases to exist, nobody will dare to
analyze parental affection as distinguished from that general human
sympathy which has secured to many an orphan fonder care in a stranger's
house than it would have received from its actual parents. Not even
Tolstoy, in The Kreutzer Sonata, has said all that we suspect about it.
When it persists beyond the period at which it ceases to be necessary to
the child's welfare, it is apt to be morbid; and we are probably wrong
to inculcate its deliberate cultivation. The natural course is for
the parents and children to cast off the specific parental and filial
relation when they are no longer necessary to one another. The
child does this readily enough to form fresh ties, closer and more
fascinating. Parents are not always excluded from such compensations:
it happens sometimes that when the children go out at the door the lover
comes in at the window. Indeed it happens now oftener than it used to,
because people remain much longer in the sexual arena. The cultivated
Jewess no longer cuts off her hair at her marriage. The British matron
has discarded her cap and her conscientious ugliness; and a bishop's
wife at fifty has more of the air of a _femme galante_ than an actress
had at thirty-five in her grandmother's time. But as people marry later,
the facts of age and time still inexorably condemn most parents to
comparative solitude when their children marry. This may be a privation
and may be a relief: probably in healthy circumstances it is no worse
than a salutary change of habit; but even at that it is, for the moment
at least, a wrench. For though parents and children sometimes dislike
one another, there is an experience of succor and a habit of dependence
and expectation formed in infancy which naturally attaches a child to
its parent or to its nurse (a foster parent) in a quite peculiar way.
A benefit to the child may be a burden to the parent; but people become
attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached
to them; and to "suffer little children" has become an affectionate
impulse deep in our nature.

Now there is no such impulse to suffer our sisters and brothers,
our aunts and uncles, much less our cousins. If we could choose our
relatives, we might, by selecting congenial ones, mitigate the repulsive
effect of the obligation to like them and to admit them to our intimacy.
But to have a person imposed on us as a brother merely because he
happens to have the same parents is unbearable when, as may easily
happen, he is the sort of person we should carefully avoid if he were
anyone else's brother. All Europe (except Scotland, which has clans
instead of families) draws the line at second cousins. Protestantism
draws it still closer by making the first cousin a marriageable
stranger; and the only reason for not drawing it at sisters and brothers
is that the institution of the family compels us to spend our
childhood with them, and thus imposes on us a curious relation in which
familiarity destroys romantic charm, and is yet expected to create a
specially warm affection. Such a relation is dangerously factitious and
unnatural; and the practical moral is that the less said at home about
specific family affection the better. Children, like grown-up people,
get on well enough together if they are not pushed down one another's
throats; and grown-up relatives will get on together in proportion
to their separation and their care not to presume on their blood
relationship. We should let children's feelings take their natural
course without prompting. I have seen a child scolded and called
unfeeling because it did not occur to it to make a theatrical
demonstration of affectionate delight when its mother returned after an
absence: a typical example of the way in which spurious family sentiment
is stoked up. We are, after all, sociable animals; and if we are let
alone in the matter of our affections, and well brought up otherwise,
we shall not get on any the worse with particular people because they
happen to be our brothers and sisters and cousins. The danger lies in
assuming that we shall get on any better.

The main point to grasp here is that families are not kept together at
present by family feeling but by human feeling. The family cultivates
sympathy and mutual help and consolation as any other form of kindly
association cultivates them; but the addition of a dictated compulsory
affection as an attribute of near kinship is not only unnecessary,
but positively detrimental; and the alleged tendency of modern social
development to break up the family need alarm nobody. We cannot break up
the facts of kinship nor eradicate its natural emotional consequences.
What we can do and ought to do is to set people free to behave naturally
and to change their behavior as circumstances change. To impose on
a citizen of London the family duties of a Highland cateran in the
eighteenth century is as absurd as to compel him to carry a claymore and
target instead of an umbrella. The civilized man has no special use
for cousins; and he may presently find that he has no special use for
brothers and sisters. The parent seems likely to remain indispensable;
but there is no reason why that natural tie should be made the excuse
for unnatural aggravations of it, as crushing to the parent as they are
oppressive to the child. The mother and father will not always have
to shoulder the burthen of maintenance which should fall on the Atlas
shoulders of the fatherland and motherland. Pending such reforms and
emancipations, a shattering break-up of the parental home must remain
one of the normal incidents of marriage. The parent is left lonely and
the child is not. Woe to the old if they have no impersonal interests,
no convictions, no public causes to advance, no tastes or hobbies! It is
well to be a mother but not to be a mother-in-law; and if men were cut
off artificially from intellectual and public interests as women are,
the father-in-law would be as deplorable a figure in popular tradition
as the mother-in-law.

It is not to be wondered at that some people hold that blood
relationship should be kept a secret from the persons related, and that
the happiest condition in this respect is that of the foundling who, if
he ever meets his parents or brothers or sisters, passes them by without
knowing them. And for such a view there is this to be said: that our
family system does unquestionably take the natural bond between members
of the same family, which, like all natural bonds, is not too tight to
be borne, and superimposes on it a painful burden of forced, inculcated,
suggested, and altogether unnecessary affection and responsibility which
we should do well to get rid of by making relatives as independent of
one another as possible.




The Fate of the Family

The difficulty of inducing people to talk sensibly about the family is
the same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume as
confusing discussions of marriage. Marriage is not a single invariable
institution: it changes from civilization to civilization, from religion
to religion, from civil code to civil code, from frontier to frontier.
The family is still more variable, because the number of persons
constituting a family, unlike the number of persons constituting a
marriage, varies from one to twenty: indeed, when a widower with a
family marries a widow with a family, and the two produce a third
family, even that very high number may be surpassed. And the conditions
may vary between opposite extremes: for example, in a London or Paris
slum every child adds to the burden of poverty and helps to starve the
parents and all the other children, whereas in a settlement of pioneer
colonists every child, from the moment it is big enough to lend a hand
to the family industry, is an investment in which the only danger is
that of temporary over-capitalization. Then there are the variations
in family sentiment. Sometimes the family organization is as frankly
political as the organization of an army or an industry: fathers being
no more expected to be sentimental about their children than colonels
about soldiers, or factory owners about their employees, though the
mother may be allowed a little tenderness if her character is weak. The
Roman father was a despot: the Chinese father is an object of worship:
the sentimental modern western father is often a play-fellow looked to
for toys and pocket-money. The farmer sees his children constantly: the
squire sees them only during the holidays, and not then oftener than he
can help: the tram conductor, when employed by a joint stock company,
sometimes never sees them at all.

Under such circumstances phrases like The Influence of Home Life, The
Family, The Domestic Hearth, and so on, are no more specific than The
Mammals, or The Man In The Street; and the pious generalizations founded
so glibly on them by our sentimental moralists are unworkable.
When households average twelve persons with the sexes about equally
represented, the results may be fairly good. When they average three the
results may be very bad indeed; and to lump the two together under
the general term The Family is to confuse the question hopelessly. The
modern small family is much too stuffy: children "brought up at home"
in it are unfit for society. But here again circumstances differ. If the
parents live in what is called a garden suburb, where there is a good
deal of social intercourse, and the family, instead of keeping itself to
itself, as the evil old saying is, and glowering at the neighbors over
the blinds of the long street in which nobody knows his neighbor and
everyone wishes to deceive him as to his income and social importance,
is in effect broken up by school life, by out-of-door habits, and by
frank neighborly intercourse through dances and concerts and theatricals
and excursions and the like, families of four may turn out much less
barbarous citizens than families of ten which attain the Boer ideal of
being out of sight of one another's chimney smoke.

All one can say is, roughly, that the homelier the home, and the more
familiar the family, the worse for everybody concerned. The family ideal
is a humbug and a nuisance: one might as reasonably talk of the barrack
ideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any other substitution of the
machinery of social organization for the end of it, which must always
be the fullest and most capable life: in short, the most godly life. And
this significant word reminds us that though the popular conception of
heaven includes a Holy Family, it does not attach to that family
the notion of a separate home, or a private nursery or kitchen or
mother-in-law, or anything that constitutes the family as we know it.
Even blood relationship is miraculously abstracted from it; and the
Father is the father of all children, the mother the mother of all
mothers and babies, and the Son the Son of Man and the Savior of his
brothers: one whose chief utterance on the subject of the conventional
family was an invitation to all of us to leave our families and follow
him, and to leave the dead to bury the dead, and not debauch ourselves
at that gloomy festival the family funeral, with its sequel of hideous
mourning and grief which is either affected or morbid.




Family Mourning

I do not know how far this detestable custom of mourning is carried in
France; but judging from the appearance of the French people I should
say that a Frenchwoman goes into mourning for her cousins to the
seventeenth degree. The result is that when I cross the Channel I seem
to have reached a country devastated by war or pestilence. It is really
suffering only from the family. Will anyone pretend that England has
not the best of this striking difference? Yet it is such senseless and
unnatural conventions as this that make us so impatient of what we call
family feeling. Even apart from its insufferable pretensions, the family
needs hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable part of it
that could not be amputated with advantage.




Art Teaching

By art teaching I hasten to say that I do not mean giving children
lessons in freehand drawing and perspective. I am simply calling
attention to the fact that fine art is the only teacher except torture.
I have already pointed out that nobody, except under threat of torture,
can read a school book. The reason is that a school book is not a work
of art. Similarly, you cannot listen to a lesson or a sermon unless the
teacher or the preacher is an artist. You cannot read the Bible if you
have no sense of literary art. The reason why the continental European
is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the
Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of
literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
To read a dull book; to listen to a tedious play or prosy sermon or
lecture; to stare at uninteresting pictures or ugly buildings: nothing,
short of disease, is more dreadful than this. The violence done to our
souls by it leaves injuries and produces subtle maladies which have
never been properly studied by psycho-pathologists. Yet we are so inured
to it in school, where practically all the teachers are bores trying
to do the work of artists, and all the books artless, that we acquire
a truly frightful power of enduring boredom. We even acquire the notion
that fine art is lascivious and destructive to the character. In church,
in the House of Commons, at public meetings, we sit solemnly listening
to bores and twaddlers because from the time we could walk or speak we
have been snubbed, scolded, bullied, beaten and imprisoned whenever we
dared to resent being bored or twaddled at, or to express our natural
impatience and derision of bores and twaddlers. And when a man arises
with a soul of sufficient native strength to break the bonds of this
inculcated reverence and to expose and deride and tweak the noses of our
humbugs and panjandrums, like Voltaire or Dickens, we are shocked and
scandalized, even when we cannot help laughing. Worse, we dread and
persecute those who can see and declare the truth, because their
sincerity and insight reflects on our delusion and blindness. We are
all like Nell Gwynne's footman, who defended Nell's reputation with his
fists, not because he believed her to be what he called an honest woman,
but because he objected to be scorned as the footman of one who was no
better than she should be.

This wretched power of allowing ourselves to be bored may seem to give
the fine arts a chance sometimes. People will sit through a performance
of Beethoven's ninth symphony or of Wagner's Ring just as they will sit
through a dull sermon or a front bench politician saying nothing for two
hours whilst his unfortunate country is perishing through the delay
of its business in Parliament. But their endurance is very bad for the
ninth symphony, because they never hiss when it is murdered. I have
heard an Italian conductor (no longer living) take the _adagio_ of that
symphony at a lively _allegretto_, slowing down for the warmer major
sections into the speed and manner of the heroine's death song in a
Verdi opera; and the listeners, far from relieving my excruciation by
rising with yells of fury and hurling their programs and opera glasses
at the miscreant, behaved just as they do when Richter conducts it. The
mass of imposture that thrives on this combination of ignorance with
despairing endurance is incalculable. Given a public trained from
childhood to stand anything tedious, and so saturated with school
discipline that even with the doors open and no schoolmasters to stop
them they will sit there helplessly until the end of the concert or
opera gives them leave to go home; and you will have in great capitals
hundreds of thousands of pounds spent every night in the season on
professedly artistic entertainments which have no other effect on fine
art than to exacerbate the hatred in which it is already secretly held
in England.

Fortunately, there are arts that cannot be cut off from the people by
bad performances. We can read books for ourselves; and we can play
a good deal of fine music for ourselves with the help of a pianola.
Nothing stands between us and the actual handwork of the great masters
of painting except distance; and modern photographic methods of
reproduction are in some cases quite and in many nearly as effective in
conveying the artist's message as a modern edition of Shakespear's plays
is in conveying the message that first existed in his handwriting. The
reproduction of great feats of musical execution is already on the
way: the phonograph, for all its wheezing and snarling and braying, is
steadily improving in its manners; and what with this improvement on the
one hand, and on the other that blessed selective faculty which enables
us to ignore a good deal of disagreeable noise if there is a thread
of music in the middle of it (few critics of the phonograph seem to be
conscious of the very considerable mechanical noise set up by choirs
and orchestras) we have at last reached a point at which, for example,
a person living in an English village where the church music is the only
music, and that music is made by a few well-intentioned ladies with
the help of a harmonium, can hear masses by Palestrina very passably
executed, and can thereby be led to the discovery that Jackson in F and
Hymns Ancient and Modern are not perhaps the last word of beauty and
propriety in the praise of God.

In short, there is a vast body of art now within the reach of everybody.
The difficulty is that this art, which alone can educate us in grace of
body and soul, and which alone can make the history of the past live for
us or the hope of the future shine for us, which alone can give delicacy
and nobility to our crude lusts, which is the appointed vehicle of
inspiration and the method of the communion of saints, is actually
branded as sinful among us because, wherever it arises, there is
resistance to tyranny, breaking of fetters, and the breath of freedom.
The attempt to suppress art is not wholly successful: we might as well
try to suppress oxygen. But it is carried far enough to inflict on huge
numbers of people a most injurious art starvation, and to corrupt a
great deal of the art that is tolerated. You will find in England plenty
of rich families with little more culture than their dogs and horses.
And you will find poor families, cut off by poverty and town life
from the contemplation of the beauty of the earth, with its dresses of
leaves, its scarves of cloud, and its contours of hill and valley, who
would positively be happier as hogs, so little have they cultivated
their humanity by the only effective instrument of culture: art. The
dearth is artificially maintained even when there are the means of
satisfying it. Story books are forbidden, picture post cards are
forbidden, theatres are forbidden, operas are forbidden, circuses are
forbidden, sweetmeats are forbidden, pretty colors are forbidden, all
exactly as vice is forbidden. The Creator is explicitly prayed to, and
implicitly convicted of indecency every day. An association of vice and
sin with everything that is delightful and of goodness with everything
that is wretched and detestable is set up. All the most perilous (and
glorious) appetites and propensities are at once inflamed by starvation
and uneducated by art. All the wholesome conditions which art imposes on
appetite are waived: instead of cultivated men and women restrained by
a thousand delicacies, repelled by ugliness, chilled by vulgarity,
horrified by coarseness, deeply and sweetly moved by the graces that art
has revealed to them and nursed in them, we get indiscriminate rapacity
in pursuit of pleasure and a parade of the grossest stimulations in
catering for it. We have a continual clamor for goodness, beauty,
virtue, and sanctity, with such an appalling inability to recognize
it or love it when it arrives that it is more dangerous to be a great
prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple
folk out of their savings. Do not for a moment suppose that uncultivated
people are merely indifferent to high and noble qualities. They hate
them malignantly. At best, such qualities are like rare and beautiful
birds: when they appear the whole country takes down its guns; but the
birds receive the statuary tribute of having their corpses stuffed.

And it really all comes from the habit of preventing children from
being troublesome. You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing how
troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo
only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse.
You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not
suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly
unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental
protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single
danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down
all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in
freedom. You have men who imagine themselves to be ministers of religion
openly declaring that when they pass through the streets they have
to keep out in the wheeled traffic to avoid the temptations of the
pavement. You have them organizing hunts of the women who tempt
them--poor creatures whom no artist would touch without a shudder--and
wildly clamoring for more clothes to disguise and conceal the body, and
for the abolition of pictures, statues, theatres, and pretty colors.
And incredible as it seems, these unhappy lunatics are left at large,
unrebuked, even admired and revered, whilst artists have to struggle for
toleration. To them an undraped human body is the most monstrous, the
most blighting, the most obscene, the most unbearable spectacle in the
universe. To an artist it is, at its best, the most admirable spectacle
in nature, and, at its average, an object of indifference. If every rag
of clothing miraculously dropped from the inhabitants of London at noon
tomorrow (say as a preliminary to the Great Judgment), the artistic
people would not turn a hair; but the artless people would go mad and
call on the mountains to hide them. I submit that this indicates a
thoroughly healthy state on the part of the artists, and a thoroughly
morbid one on the part of the artless. And the healthy state is
attainable in a cold country like ours only by familiarity with the
undraped figure acquired through pictures, statues, and theatrical
representations in which an illusion of natural clotheslessness is
produced and made poetic.

In short, we all grow up stupid and mad to just the extent to which we
have not been artistically educated; and the fact that this taint of
stupidity and madness has to be tolerated because it is general, and is
even boasted of as characteristically English, makes the situation all
the worse. It is becoming exceedingly grave at present, because the last
ray of art is being cut off from our schools by the discontinuance of
religious education.




The Impossibility of Secular Education

Now children must be taught some sort of religion. Secular education is
an impossibility. Secular education comes to this: that the only reason
for ceasing to do evil and learning to do well is that if you do not you
will be caned. This is worse than being taught in a church school that
if you become a dissenter you will go to hell; for hell is presented as
the instrument of something eternal, divine, and inevitable: you cannot
evade it the moment the schoolmaster's back is turned. What confuses
this issue and leads even highly intelligent religious persons to
advocate secular education as a means of rescuing children from the
strife of rival proselytizers is the failure to distinguish between
the child's personal subjective need for a religion and its right to
an impartially communicated historical objective knowledge of all the
creeds and Churches. Just as a child, no matter what its race and color
may be, should know that there are black men and brown men and yellow
men, and, no matter what its political convictions may be, that
there are Monarchists and Republicans and Positivists, Socialists and
Unsocialists, so it should know that there are Christians and Mahometans
and Buddhists and Shintoists and so forth, and that they are on the
average just as honest and well-behaved as its own father. For example,
it should not be told that Allah is a false god set up by the Turks and
Arabs, who will all be damned for taking that liberty; but it should be
told that many English people think so, and that many Turks and Arabs
think the converse about English people. It should be taught that Allah
is simply the name by which God is known to Turks and Arabs, who are
just as eligible for salvation as any Christian. Further, that the
practical reason why a Turkish child should pray in a mosque and an
English child in a church is that as worship is organized in Turkey in
mosques in the name of Mahomet and in England in churches in the name
of Christ, a Turkish child joining the Church of England or an English
child following Mahomet will find that it has no place for its worship
and no organization of its religion within its reach. Any other teaching
of the history and present facts of religion is false teaching, and is
politically extremely dangerous in an empire in which a huge majority of
the fellow subjects of the governing island do not profess the religion
of that island.

But this objectivity, though intellectually honest, tells the child
only what other people believe. What it should itself believe is quite
another matter. The sort of Rationalism which says to a child "You must
suspend your judgment until you are old enough to choose your religion"
is Rationalism gone mad. The child must have a conscience and a code
of honor (which is the essence of religion) even if it be only a
provisional one, to be revised at its confirmation. For confirmation is
meant to signalize a spiritual coming of age, and may be a repudiation.
Really active souls have many confirmations and repudiations as their
life deepens and their knowledge widens. But what is to guide the child
before its first confirmation? Not mere orders, because orders must
have a sanction of some sort or why should the child obey them? If, as a
Secularist, you refuse to teach any sanction, you must say "You will
be punished if you disobey." "Yes," says the child to itself, "if I am
found out; but wait until your back is turned and I will do as I like,
and lie about it." There can be no objective punishment for successful
fraud; and as no espionage can cover the whole range of a child's
conduct, the upshot is that the child becomes a liar and schemer with an
atrophied conscience. And a good many of the orders given to it are not
obeyed after all. Thus the Secularist who is not a fool is forced to
appeal to the child's vital impulse towards perfection, to the divine
spark; and no resolution not to call this impulse an impulse of loyalty
to the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, or obedience to the Will of God,
or any other standard theological term, can alter the fact that the
Secularist has stepped outside Secularism and is educating the child
religiously, even if he insists on repudiating that pious adverb and
substituting the word metaphysically.




Natural Selection as a Religion

We must make up our minds to it therefore that whatever measures we may
be forced to take to prevent the recruiting sergeants of the Churches,
free or established, from obtaining an exclusive right of entry to
schools, we shall not be able to exclude religion from them. The most
horrible of all religions: that which teaches us to regard ourselves
as the helpless prey of a series of senseless accidents called Natural
Selection, is allowed and even welcomed in so-called secular schools
because it is, in a sense, the negation of all religion; but for school
purposes a religion is a belief which affects conduct; and no belief
affects conduct more radically and often so disastrously as the belief
that the universe is a product of Natural Selection. What is more, the
theory of Natural Selection cannot be kept out of schools, because
many of the natural facts that present the most plausible appearance
of design can be accounted for by Natural Selection; and it would be so
absurd to keep a child in delusive ignorance of so potent a factor
in evolution as to keep it in ignorance of radiation or capillary
attraction. Even if you make a religion of Natural Selection, and
teach the child to regard itself as the irresponsible prey of its
circumstances and appetites (or its heredity as you will perhaps call
them), you will none the less find that its appetites are stimulated by
your encouragement and daunted by your discouragement; that one of its
appetites is an appetite for perfection; that if you discourage this
appetite and encourage the cruder acquisitive appetites the child will
steal and lie and be a nuisance to you; and that if you encourage its
appetite for perfection and teach it to attach a peculiar sacredness
to it and place it before the other appetites, it will be a much nicer
child and you will have a much easier job, at which point you will,
in spite of your pseudoscientific jargon, find yourself back in the
old-fashioned religious teaching as deep as Dr. Watts and in fact
fathoms deeper.




Moral Instruction Leagues

And now the voices of our Moral Instruction Leagues will be lifted,
asking whether there is any reason why the appetite for perfection
should not be cultivated in rationally scientific terms instead of being
associated with the story of Jonah and the great fish and the thousand
other tales that grow up round religions. Yes: there are many reasons;
and one of them is that children all like the story of Jonah and the
whale (they insist on its being a whale in spite of demonstrations by
Bible smashers without any sense of humor that Jonah would not have
fitted into a whale's gullet--as if the story would be credible of a
whale with an enlarged throat) and that no child on earth can stand
moral instruction books or catechisms or any other statement of the case
for religion in abstract terms. The object of a moral instruction book
is not to be rational, scientific, exact, proof against controversy, nor
even credible: its object is to make children good; and if it makes them
sick instead its place is the waste-paper basket.

Take for an illustration the story of Elisha and the bears. To the
authors of the moral instruction books it is in the last degree
reprehensible. It is obviously not true as a record of fact; and the
picture it gives us of the temper of God (which is what interests an
adult reader) is shocking and blasphemous. But it is a capital story for
a child. It interests a child because it is about bears; and it leaves
the child with an impression that children who poke fun at old gentlemen
and make rude remarks about bald heads are not nice children, which is
a highly desirable impression, and just as much as a child is capable
of receiving from the story. When a story is about God and a child,
children take God for granted and criticize the child. Adults do the
opposite, and are thereby led to talk great nonsense about the bad
effect of Bible stories on infants.

But let no one think that a child or anyone else can learn religion from
a teacher or a book or by any academic process whatever. It is only
by an unfettered access to the whole body of Fine Art: that is, to the
whole body of inspired revelation, that we can build up that conception
of divinity to which all virtue is an aspiration. And to hope to find
this body of art purified from all that is obsolete or dangerous
or fierce or lusty, or to pick and choose what will be good for any
particular child, much less for all children, is the shallowest
of vanities. Such schoolmasterly selection is neither possible nor
desirable. Ignorance of evil is not virtue but imbecility: admiring
it is like giving a prize for honesty to a man who has not stolen your
watch because he did not know you had one. Virtue chooses good from
evil; and without knowledge there can be no choice. And even this is a
dangerous simplification of what actually occurs. We are not choosing:
we are growing. Were you to cut all of what you call the evil out of
a child, it would drop dead. If you try to stretch it to full human
stature when it is ten years old, you will simply pull it into two
pieces and be hanged. And when you try to do this morally, which is what
parents and schoolmasters are doing every day, you ought to be hanged;
and some day, when we take a sensible view of the matter, you will be;
and serve you right. The child does not stand between a good and a
bad angel: what it has to deal with is a middling angel who, in normal
healthy cases, wants to be a good angel as fast as it can without
killing itself in the process, which is a dangerous one.

Therefore there is no question of providing the child with a carefully
regulated access to good art. There is no good art, any more than there
is good anything else in the absolute sense. Art that is too good for
the child will either teach it nothing or drive it mad, as the Bible has
driven many people mad who might have kept their sanity had they been
allowed to read much lower forms of literature. The practical moral is
that we must read whatever stories, see whatever pictures, hear whatever
songs and symphonies, go to whatever plays we like. We shall not like
those which have nothing to say to us; and though everyone has a right
to bias our choice, no one has a right to deprive us of it by keeping us
from any work of art or any work of art from us.

I may now say without danger of being misunderstood that the popular
English compromise called Cowper Templeism (unsectarian Bible education)
is not so silly as it looks. It is true that the Bible inculcates half
a dozen religions: some of them barbarous; some cynical and pessimistic;
some amoristic and romantic; some sceptical and challenging; some
kindly, simple, and intuitional; some sophistical and intellectual; none
suited to the character and conditions of western civilization unless it
be the Christianity which was finally suppressed by the Crucifixion, and
has never been put into practice by any State before or since. But the
Bible contains the ancient literature of a very remarkable Oriental
race; and the imposition of this literature, on whatever false
pretences, on our children left them more literate than if they knew
no literature at all, which was the practical alternative. And as our
Authorized Version is a great work of art as well, to know it was better
than knowing no art, which also was the practical alternative. It is
at least not a school book; and it is not a bad story book, horrible as
some of the stories are. Therefore as between the Bible and the blank
represented by secular education, the choice is with the Bible.




The Bible

But the Bible is not sufficient. The real Bible of modern Europe is the
whole body of great literature in which the inspiration and revelation
of Hebrew Scripture has been continued to the present day. Nietzsche's
Thus Spake Zoroaster is less comforting to the ill and unhappy than the
Psalms; but it is much truer, subtler, and more edifying. The pleasure
we get from the rhetoric of the book of Job and its tragic picture of a
bewildered soul cannot disguise the ignoble irrelevance of the retort of
God with which it closes, or supply the need of such modern revelations
as Shelley's Prometheus or The Niblung's Ring of Richard Wagner. There
is nothing in the Bible greater in inspiration than Beethoven's ninth
symphony; and the power of modern music to convey that inspiration to
a modern man is far greater than that of Elizabethan English, which is,
except for people steeped in the Bible from childhood like Sir Walter
Scott and Ruskin, a dead language.

Besides, many who have no ear for literature or for music are accessible
to architecture, to pictures, to statues, to dresses, and to the arts of
the stage. Every device of art should be brought to bear on the young;
so that they may discover some form of it that delights them naturally;
for there will come to all of them that period between dawning
adolescence and full maturity when the pleasures and emotions of art
will have to satisfy cravings which, if starved or insulted, may become
morbid and seek disgraceful satisfactions, and, if prematurely gratified
otherwise than poetically, may destroy the stamina of the race. And it
must be borne in mind that the most dangerous art for this necessary
purpose is the art that presents itself as religious ecstasy. Young
people are ripe for love long before they are ripe for religion. Only
a very foolish person would substitute the Imitation of Christ for
Treasure Island as a present for a boy or girl, or for Byron's Don Juan
as a present for a swain or lass. Pickwick is the safest saint for us in
our nonage. Flaubert's Temptation of St Anthony is an excellent book
for a man of fifty, perhaps the best within reach as a healthy study of
visionary ecstasy; but for the purposes of a boy of fifteen Ivanhoe and
the Templar make a much better saint and devil. And the boy of
fifteen will find this out for himself if he is allowed to wander in a
well-stocked literary garden, and hear bands and see pictures and spend
his pennies on cinematograph shows. His choice may often be rather
disgusting to his elders when they want him to choose the best before he
is ready for it. The greatest Protestant Manifesto ever written, as
far as I know, is Houston Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century: everybody capable of it should read it. Probably the History of
Maria Monk is at the opposite extreme of merit (this is a guess: I have
never read it); but it is certain that a boy let loose in a library
would go for Maria Monk and have no use whatever for Mr Chamberlain. I
should probably have read Maria Monk myself if I had not had the Arabian
Nights and their like to occupy me better. In art, children, like
adults, will find their level if they are left free to find it, and not
restricted to what adults think good for them. Just at present our
young people are going mad over ragtimes, apparently because syncopated
rhythms are new to them. If they had learnt what can be done with
syncopation from Beethoven's third Leonora overture, they would enjoy
the ragtimes all the more; but they would put them in their proper place
as amusing vulgarities.




Artist Idolatry

But there are more dangerous influences than ragtimes waiting for people
brought up in ignorance of fine art. Nothing is more pitiably ridiculous
than the wild worship of artists by those who have never been seasoned
in youth to the enchantments of art. Tenors and prima donnas, pianists
and violinists, actors and actresses enjoy powers of seduction which in
the middle ages would have exposed them to the risk of being burnt
for sorcery. But as they exercise this power by singing, playing, and
acting, no great harm is done except perhaps to themselves. Far graver
are the powers enjoyed by brilliant persons who are also connoisseurs
in art. The influence they can exercise on young people who have been
brought up in the darkness and wretchedness of a home without art, and
in whom a natural bent towards art has always been baffled and snubbed,
is incredible to those who have not witnessed and understood it. He (or
she) who reveals the world of art to them opens heaven to them. They
become satellites, disciples, worshippers of the apostle. Now the
apostle may be a voluptuary without much conscience. Nature may have
given him enough virtue to suffice in a reasonable environment. But this
allowance may not be enough to defend him against the temptation and
demoralization of finding himself a little god on the strength of
what ought to be a quite ordinary culture. He may find adorers in
all directions in our uncultivated society among people of stronger
character than himself, not one of whom, if they had been artistically
educated, would have had anything to learn from him or regarded him
as in any way extraordinary apart from his actual achievements as an
artist. Tartuffe is not always a priest. Indeed he is not always a
rascal: he is often a weak man absurdly credited with omniscience and
perfection, and taking unfair advantages only because they are offered
to him and he is too weak to refuse. Give everyone his culture, and no
one will offer him more than his due.

In thus delivering our children from the idolatry of the artist, we
shall not destroy for them the enchantment of art: on the contrary, we
shall teach them to demand art everywhere as a condition attainable
by cultivating the body, mind, and heart. Art, said Morris, is the
expression of pleasure in work. And certainly, when work is made
detestable by slavery, there is no art. It is only when learning is
made a slavery by tyrannical teachers that art becomes loathsome to the
pupil.




"The Machine"

When we set to work at a Constitution to secure freedom for children, we
had better bear in mind that the children may not be at all obliged to
us for our pains. Rousseau said that men are born free; and this saying,
in its proper bearings, was and is a great and true saying; yet let it
not lead us into the error of supposing that all men long for freedom
and embrace it when it is offered to them. On the contrary, it has to
be forced on them; and even then they will give it the slip if it is not
religiously inculcated and strongly safeguarded.

Besides, men are born docile, and must in the nature of things remain so
with regard to everything they do not understand. Now political science
and the art of government are among the things they do not understand,
and indeed are not at present allowed to understand. They can be
enslaved by a system, as we are at present, because it happens to be
there, and nobody understands it. An intelligently worked Capitalist
system, as Comte saw, would give us all that most of us are intelligent
enough to want. What makes it produce such unspeakably vile results is
that it is an automatic system which is as little understood by those
who profit by it in money as by those who are starved and degraded by
it: our millionaires and statesmen are manifestly no more "captains
of industry" or scientific politicians than our bookmakers are
mathematicians. For some time past a significant word has been coming
into use as a substitute for Destiny, Fate, and Providence. It is "The
Machine": the machine that has no god in it. Why do governments do
nothing in spite of reports of Royal Commissions that establish the most
frightful urgency? Why do our philanthropic millionaires do nothing,
though they are ready to throw bucketfuls of gold into the streets? The
Machine will not let them. Always the Machine. In short, they dont know
how.

They try to reform Society as an old lady might try to restore a broken
down locomotive by prodding it with a knitting needle. And this is not
at all because they are born fools, but because they have been educated,
not into manhood and freedom, but into blindness and slavery by
their parents and schoolmasters, themselves the victims of a similar
misdirection, and consequently of The Machine. They do not want
liberty. They have not been educated to want it. They choose slavery and
inequality; and all the other evils are automatically added to them.

And yet we must have The Machine. It is only in unskilled hands under
ignorant direction that machinery is dangerous. We can no more govern
modern communities without political machinery than we can feed and
clothe them without industrial machinery. Shatter The Machine, and you
get Anarchy. And yet The Machine works so detestably at present that we
have people who advocate Anarchy and call themselves Anarchists.




The Provocation to Anarchism

What is valid in Anarchism is that all Governments try to simplify their
task by destroying liberty and glorifying authority in general and their
own deeds in particular. But the difficulty in combining law and
order with free institutions is not a natural one. It is a matter of
inculcation. If people are brought up to be slaves, it is useless and
dangerous to let them loose at the age of twenty-one and say "Now you
are free." No one with the tamed soul and broken spirit of a slave can
be free. It is like saying to a laborer brought up on a family income of
thirteen shillings a week, "Here is one hundred thousand pounds: now you
are wealthy." Nothing can make such a man really wealthy. Freedom and
wealth are difficult and responsible conditions to which men must be
accustomed and socially trained from birth. A nation that is free at
twenty-one is not free at all; just as a man first enriched at fifty
remains poor all his life, even if he does not curtail it by drinking
himself to death in the first wild ecstasy of being able to swallow as
much as he likes for the first time. You cannot govern men brought up
as slaves otherwise than as slaves are governed. You may pile Bills
of Right and Habeas Corpus Acts on Great Charters; promulgate American
Constitutions; burn the chateaux and guillotine the seigneurs; chop
off the heads of kings and queens and set up Democracy on the ruins of
feudalism: the end of it all for us is that already in the twentieth
century there has been as much brute coercion and savage intolerance, as
much flogging and hanging, as much impudent injustice on the bench
and lustful rancor in the pulpit, as much naive resort to torture,
persecution, and suppression of free speech and freedom of the press,
as much war, as much of the vilest excess of mutilation, rapine, and
delirious indiscriminate slaughter of helpless non-combatants, old
and young, as much prostitution of professional talent, literary and
political, in defence of manifest wrong, as much cowardly sycophancy
giving fine names to all this villainy or pretending that it is "greatly
exaggerated," as we can find any record of from the days when the
advocacy of liberty was a capital offence and Democracy was hardly
thinkable. Democracy exhibits the vanity of Louis XIV, the savagery
of Peter of Russia, the nepotism and provinciality of Napoleon, the
fickleness of Catherine II: in short, all the childishnesses of all the
despots without any of the qualities that enabled the greatest of them
to fascinate and dominate their contemporaries.

And the flatterers of Democracy are as impudently servile to the
successful, and insolent to common honest folk, as the flatterers of
the monarchs. Democracy in America has led to the withdrawal of ordinary
refined persons from politics; and the same result is coming in England
as fast as we make Democracy as democratic as it is in America. This is
true also of popular religion: it is so horribly irreligious that nobody
with the smallest pretence to culture, or the least inkling of what
the great prophets vainly tried to make the world understand, will have
anything to do with it except for purely secular reasons.




Imagination

Before we can clearly understand how baleful is this condition of
intimidation in which we live, it is necessary to clear up the confusion
made by our use of the word imagination to denote two very different
powers of mind. One is the power to imagine things as they are not:
this I call the romantic imagination. The other is the power to imagine
things as they are without actually sensing them; and this I will call
the realistic imagination. Take for example marriage and war. One man
has a vision of perpetual bliss with a domestic angel at home, and of
flashing sabres, thundering guns, victorious cavalry charges, and routed
enemies in the field. That is romantic imagination; and the mischief it
does is incalculable. It begins in silly and selfish expectations of
the impossible, and ends in spiteful disappointment, sour grievance,
cynicism, and misanthropic resistance to any attempt to better a
hopeless world. The wise man knows that imagination is not only a means
of pleasing himself and beguiling tedious hours with romances and fairy
tales and fools' paradises (a quite defensible and delightful amusement
when you know exactly what you are doing and where fancy ends and facts
begin), but also a means of foreseeing and being prepared for realities
as yet unexperienced, and of testing the possibility and desirability of
serious Utopias. He does not expect his wife to be an angel; nor does he
overlook the facts that war depends on the rousing of all the murderous
blackguardism still latent in mankind; that every victory means a
defeat; that fatigue, hunger, terror, and disease are the raw material
which romancers work up into military glory; and that soldiers for the
most part go to war as children go to school, because they are afraid
not to. They are afraid even to say they are afraid, as such candor is
punishable by death in the military code.

A very little realistic imagination gives an ambitious person enormous
power over the multitudinous victims of the romantic imagination. For
the romancer not only pleases himself with fictitious glories: he also
terrifies himself with imaginary dangers. He does not even picture what
these dangers are: he conceives the unknown as always dangerous. When
you say to a realist "You must do this" or "You must not do that," he
instantly asks what will happen to him if he does (or does not, as the
case may be). Failing an unromantic convincing answer, he does just as
he pleases unless he can find for himself a real reason for refraining.
In short, though you can intimidate him, you cannot bluff him. But
you can always bluff the romantic person: indeed his grasp of real
considerations is so feeble that you find it necessary to bluff him even
when you have solid considerations to offer him instead. The campaigns
of Napoleon, with their atmosphere of glory, illustrate this. In
the Russian campaign Napoleon's marshals achieved miracles of bluff,
especially Ney, who, with a handful of men, monstrously outnumbered,
repeatedly kept the Russian troops paralyzed with terror by pure
bounce. Napoleon himself, much more a realist than Ney (that was why
he dominated him), would probably have surrendered; for sometimes the
bravest of the brave will achieve successes never attempted by the
cleverest of the clever. Wellington was a completer realist than
Napoleon. It was impossible to persuade Wellington that he was beaten
until he actually was beaten. He was unbluffable; and if Napoleon had
understood the nature of Wellington's strength instead of returning
Wellington's snobbish contempt for him by an academic contempt for
Wellington, he would not have left the attack at Waterloo to Ney and
D'Erlon, who, on that field, did not know when they were beaten, whereas
Wellington knew precisely when he was not beaten. The unbluffable
would have triumphed anyhow, probably, because Napoleon was an academic
soldier, doing the academic thing (the attack in columns and so forth)
with superlative ability and energy; whilst Wellington was an original
soldier who, instead of outdoing the terrible academic columns with
still more terrible and academic columns, outwitted them with the thin
red line, not of heroes, but, as this uncompromising realist never
hesitated to testify, of the scum of the earth.




Government by Bullies

These picturesque martial incidents are being reproduced every day in
our ordinary life. We are bluffed by hardy simpletons and headstrong
bounders as the Russians were bluffed by Ney; and our Wellingtons
are threadbound by slave-democracy as Gulliver was threadbound by the
Lilliputians. We are a mass of people living in a submissive routine to
which we have been drilled from our childhood. When you ask us to take
the simplest step outside that routine, we say shyly, "Oh, I really
couldnt," or "Oh, I shouldnt like to," without being able to point out
the smallest harm that could possibly ensue: victims, not of a rational
fear of real dangers, but of pure abstract fear, the quintessence of
cowardice, the very negation of "the fear of God." Dotted about among
us are a few spirits relatively free from this inculcated paralysis,
sometimes because they are half-witted, sometimes because they are
unscrupulously selfish, sometimes because they are realists as to money
and unimaginative as to other things, sometimes even because they are
exceptionally able, but always because they are not afraid of shadows
nor oppressed with nightmares. And we see these few rising as if by
magic into power and affluence, and forming, with the millionaires who
have accidentally gained huge riches by the occasional windfalls of our
commerce, the governing class. Now nothing is more disastrous than
a governing class that does not know how to govern. And how can this
rabble of the casual products of luck, cunning, and folly, be expected
to know how to govern? The merely lucky ones and the hereditary ones do
not owe their position to their qualifications at all. As to the rest,
the realism which seems their essential qualification often consists not
only in a lack of romantic imagination, which lack is a merit, but
of the realistic, constructive, Utopian imagination, which lack is
a ghastly defect. Freedom from imaginative illusion is therefore no
guarantee whatever of nobility of character: that is why inculcated
submissiveness makes us slaves to people much worse than ourselves,
and why it is so important that submissiveness should no longer be
inculcated.

And yet as long as you have the compulsory school as we know it, we
shall have submissiveness inculcated. What is more, until the active
hours of child life are organized separately from the active hours of
adult life, so that adults can enjoy the society of children in reason
without being tormented, disturbed, harried, burdened, and hindered
in their work by them as they would be now if there were no compulsory
schools and no children hypnotized into the belief that they must tamely
go to them and be imprisoned and beaten and over-tasked in them, we
shall have schools under one pretext or another; and we shall have all
the evil consequences and all the social hopelessness that result from
turning a nation of potential freemen and freewomen into a nation of
two-legged spoilt spaniels with everything crushed out of their nature
except dread of the whip. Liberty is the breath of life to nations; and
liberty is the one thing that parents, schoolmasters, and rulers spend
their lives in extirpating for the sake of an immediately quiet and
finally disastrous life.


Notes on this etext:

     This text was taken from a printed volume containing the
     plays "Misalliance", "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets",
     "Fanny's First Play", and the essay "A Treatise on Parents
     and Children".

     Notes on the editing:  Italicized text is delimited with
     underlines ("_").  Punctuation and spelling retained as in
     the printed text. Shaw intentionally spelled many words
     according to a non-standard system.  For example, "don't" is
     given as "dont" (without apostrophe), "Dr." is given as "Dr"
     (without a period at the end), and "Shakespeare" is given as
     "Shakespear" (no "e" at the end).  The pound (currency)
     symbol has been replaced by the word "pounds".