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 ofthe Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Forceeither will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very loworganisms: indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba isimmortal. Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer thantheir friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants are believed tobe capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human inhabitant. Butthe fact that new ones are born conclusively proves that they are notimmortal. Do away with death and you do away with the need for birth: infact if you went on breeding, you would finally have to kill old peopleto make room for young ones. 

Now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the LifeForce. People with no imagination try to make things which will last forever, and even want to live for ever themselves. But the intelligentlyimaginative man knows very well that it is waste of labor to make amachine that will last ten years, because it will probably be supersededin half that time by an improved machine answering the same purpose. He also knows that if some devil were to convince us that our dreamof personal immortality is no dream but a hard fact, such a shriek ofdespair would go up from the human race as no other conceivable horrorcould provoke. With all our perverse nonsense as to John Smith livingfor a thousand million eons and for ever after, we die voluntarily, knowing that it is time for us to be scrapped, to be remanufactured, tocome back, as Wordsworth divined, trailing ever brightening clouds ofglory. We must all be born again, and yet again and again. We shouldlike 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 idleliking is not will. It is amazing--considering the way we talk--howlittle a man will do to get 50 pounds: all the 50-pound notes I haveever known of have been more easily earned than a laborious sixpence;but the difficulty of inducing a man to make any serious effort toobtain 50 pounds is nothing to the difficulty of inducing him to make aserious effort to keep alive. The moment he sees death approach, he getsinto bed and sends for a doctor. He knows very well at the back ofhis conscience that he is rather a poor job and had better beremanufactured. He knows that his death will make room for a birth; andhe hopes that it will be a birth of something that he aspired to be andfell short of. He knows that it is through death and rebirth thatthis corruptible shall become incorruptible, and this mortal put onimmortality. Practise as you will on his ignorance, his fears, and hisimagination, with bribes of paradises and threats of hells, there isonly one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of itsvictory; and that is the belief that we can lay down the burden of ourwretched little makeshift individualities for ever at each lift towardsthe goal of evolution, which can only be a being that cannot be improvedupon. After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit ofbelieving that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even tohimself? Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be madeperfect 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 (andwhat I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that you may just as wellgive me a new name and face the fact that I am a new person and thatthe old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton. Thus, oddly enough, theconventional belief in the matter comes to this: that if you wish tolive for ever you must be wicked enough to be irretrievably damned, since the saved are no longer what they were, and in hell alone dopeople retain their sinful nature: that is to say, their individuality. And this sort of hell, however convenient as a means of intimidatingpersons 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 wayout, not outside on the way in. Therefore let us give up telling oneanother idle stories, and rejoice in death as we rejoice in birth; forwithout death we cannot be born again; and the man who does not wishto be born again and born better is fit only to represent the City ofLondon 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 childrenon the assumption that the man is father to the child? Oh, thesefathers! And we are not content with fathers: we must have godfathers, forgetting that the child is godfather to the man. Has it ever struckyou as curious that in a country where the first article of belief isthat every child is born with a godfather whom we all call "our fatherwhich art in heaven, " two very limited individual mortals shouldbe allowed to appear at its baptism and explain that they are itsgodparents, and that they will look after its salvation until it is nolonger a child. I had a godmother who made herself responsible in thisway 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 sexentitled me to a heavier article. I must have seen that lady at leastfour times in the twenty years following. She never alluded to mysalvation in any way. People occasionally ask me to act as godfather totheir children with a levity which convinces me that they have not thefaintest notion that it involves anything more than calling the helplesschild George Bernard without regard to the possibility that it may growup in the liveliest abhorrence of my notions. 

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

However, my business is not to make confusion worse confounded, but toclear it up. Only, it is as well to begin by a sample of current thoughtand practice which shews that on the subject of children we are verydeeply confused. On the whole, whatever our theory or no theory maybe, our practice is to treat the child as the property of its immediatephysical parents, and to allow them to do what they like with it as faras it will let them. It has no rights and no liberties: in short, itscondition is that which adults recognize as the most miserable anddangerous politically possible for themselves: namely, the condition ofslavery. For its alleviation we trust to the natural affection of theparties, and to public opinion. A father cannot for his own credit lethis son go in rags. Also, in a very large section of the population, parents finally become dependent on their children. Thus there arechecks on child slavery which do not exist, or are less powerful, in thecase of manual and industrial slavery. Sensationally bad cases fall intotwo classes, which are really the same class: namely, the childrenwhose parents are excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of pettingchildren, and the children whose parents are excessively addicted to thesensual luxury of physically torturing them. There is a Society for thePrevention of Cruelty to Children which has effectually made an end ofour belief that mothers are any more to be trusted than stepmothers, orfathers than slave-drivers. And there is a growing body of law designedto prevent parents from using their children ruthlessly to make moneyfor the household. Such legislation has always been furiously resistedby the parents, even when the horrors of factory slavery were attheir worst; and the extension of such legislation at present would beimpossible if it were not that the parents affected by it cannot controla majority of votes in Parliament. In domestic life a great deal ofservice is done by children, the girls acting as nursemaids and generalservants, and the lads as errand boys. In the country both boys andgirls do a substantial share of farm labor. This is why it is necessaryto coerce poor parents to send their children to school, though in therelatively small class which keeps plenty of servants it is impossibleto induce parents to keep their children at home instead of payingschoolmasters to take them off their hands. 

It appears then that the bond of affection between parents and childrendoes not save children from the slavery that denial of rights involvesin adult political relations. It sometimes intensifies it, sometimesmitigates it; but on the whole children and parents confront one anotheras two classes in which all the political power is on one side; andthe results are not at all unlike what they would be if there were noimmediate consanguinity between them, and one were white and the otherblack, or one enfranchised and the other disenfranchised, or one rankedas gentle and the other simple. Not that Nature counts for nothing inthe case and political rights for everything. But a denial of politicalrights, and the resultant delivery of one class into the mastery ofanother, affects their relations so extensively and profoundly that itis impossible to ascertain what the real natural relations of the twoclasses 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 experimentif you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure ofyour 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 beplayed with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to make moneyfor you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight its way throughin spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts willresist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance; but if youbegin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn them for your ownpurposes, 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 roomwith a cuff or a kick; and the experience will be as instructive to thechild as a difficulty with a short-tempered dog or a bull. Francis Placetells us that his father always struck his children when he found onewithin his reach. The effect on the young Places seems to have beensimply to make them keep out of their father's way, which was no doubtwhat he desired, as far as he desired anything at all. Francis recordsthe habit without bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that hisfather respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside ofit; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to hiscountry as that rare and admirable thing, a Freethinker: the onlysort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whosereligious convictions, command any respect. 

Now Mr Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father; andI do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as comparedwith the conventional good father who deliberately imposes himself onhis son as a god; who takes advantage of childish credulity and parentworship to persuade his son that what he approves of is right and whathe disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct on thechild by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and eulogies, for which he claims divine sanction: compared to this sort ofabortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost as aProvidence. Not that it is possible to live with children any more thanwith grown-up people without imposing rules of conduct on them. Thereis 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 variousanswers in use. The simplest: "Because it irritates me, " may fail; forit may strike the child as being rather amusing to irritate you; alsothe child, having comparatively no nerves, may be unable to conceiveyour meaning vividly enough. In any case it may want to make a noisemore than to spare your feelings. You may therefore have to explainthat the effect of the irritation will be that you will do somethingunpleasant if the noise continues. The something unpleasant may be onlya look of suffering to rouse the child's affectionate sympathy (if ithas any), or it may run to forcible expulsion from the room with plentyof unnecessary violence; but the principle is the same: there are nofalse pretences involved: the child learns in a straightforward way thatit does not pay to be inconsiderate. Also, perhaps, that Mamma, who madethe 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 neitherstraightforward, instructive, nor harmless. In its simplest form itsubstitutes for "Stop that noise, " "Dont be naughty, " which means thatthe child, instead of annoying you by a perfectly healthy and naturalinfantile procedure, is offending God. This is a blasphemous lie; andthe fact that it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does not excuse itin 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 whoused to tell me that if I were not good, by which she meant if I didnot behave with a single eye to her personal convenience, the cock wouldcome down the chimney. Less imaginative but equally dishonest peopletold 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 provokedresentment and not vicious cruelty, cannot harm a child as this sort ofpious fraud harms it. There is a legal limit to physical cruelty; andthere are also human limits to it. There is an active Society whichbrings to book a good many parents who starve and torture and overworktheir children, and intimidates a good many more. When parents of thistype are caught, they are treated as criminals; and not infrequentlythe police have some trouble to save them from being lynched. Thepeople against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devotethemselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which iscalled bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knowsthe way a child should go. All the ways discovered so far lead to thehorrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably byRuskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one anotherfor scraps of food. Pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that preciousand sacred thing the child's conscience into an instrument of our ownconvenience, and to use that wonderful and terrible power called Shameto grind our own axe. It is the sin of stealing fire from the altar: asin so impudently practised by popes, parents, and pedagogues, that onecan hardly expect the nurserymaids to see any harm in stealing a fewcinders when they are worrited. 

Into the blackest depths of this violation of children's souls one canhardly bear to look; for here we find pious fraud masking the violationof the body by obscene cruelty. Any parent or school teacher who takesa secret and abominable delight in torture is allowed to lay traps intowhich every child must fall, and then beat it to his or her heart'scontent. A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obviousconviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded, that theonly thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience andperfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said, he must insist. Asone of them is not a virtue at all, and the other is the attribute of agod, one can imagine what the lives of this gentleman's children wouldhave been if it had been possible for him to live down to his monstrousand foolish pretensions. And yet he might have written his letter to TheTimes (he very nearly did, by the way) without incurring any danger ofbeing removed to an asylum, or even losing his reputation for takinga very proper view of his parental duties. And at least it was not atrivial view, nor an ill meant one. It was much more respectable thanthe general consensus of opinion that if a school teacher can devise aquestion a child cannot answer, or overhear it calling omega omeega, he or she may beat the child viciously. Only, the cruelty must bewhitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretence of reluctance. It must befor the child's good. The assailant must say "This hurts me more thanit hurts you. " There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The injury tothe child would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly "I beat youbecause I like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I can contrivean excuse for it. " But to represent this detestable lust to the childas Divine wrath, and the cruelty as the beneficent act of God, which isexactly 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 andblinding of the child's soul, which can bring nothing but horror toanyone. 

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 moralmonsters of our own children. The most excusable parents are those whotry to correct their own faults in their offspring. The parent who saysto his child: "I am one of the successes of the Almighty: thereforeimitate 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 holdyourself up to your children as an object lesson (which is not at allnecessary), hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example. Butyou had much better let the child's character alone. If you once allowyourself to regard a child as so much material for you to manufactureinto any shape that happens to suit your fancy you are defeating theexperiment of the Life Force. You are assuming that the child doesnot know its own business, and that you do. In this you are sure to bewrong: the child feels the drive of the Life Force (often called theWill of God); and you cannot feel it for him. Handel's parents no doubtthought they knew better than their child when they tried to preventhis becoming a musician. They would have been equally wrong and equallyunsuccessful if they had tried to prevent the child becoming a greatrascal had its genius lain in that direction. Handel would have beenHandel, and Napoleon and Peter of Russia _them_selves in spite of allthe parents in creation, because, as often happens, they were strongerthan their parents. But this does not happen always. Most childrencan be, and many are, hopelessly warped and wasted by parents who areignorant and silly enough to suppose that they know what a human beingought to be, and who stick at nothing in their determination to forcetheir children into their moulds. Every child has a right to its ownbent. It has a right to be a Plymouth Brother though its parents beconvinced atheists. It has a right to dislike its mother or father orsister or brother or uncle or aunt if they are antipathetic to it. Ithas a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that wayseems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a rightto privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if itwere 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 bemore effectually violated. In a family of ten, eight, six, or even fourchildren, the rights of the younger ones to a great extent take care ofthemselves 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 interfereto a disastrous extent with the rights and liberties of one child. Butby the time a fourth child has arrived, they are not only outnumberedtwo to one, but are getting tired of the thankless and mischievous jobof bringing up their children in the way they think they should go. Theold observation that members of large families get on in the worldholds good because in large families it is impossible for each child toreceive what schoolmasters call "individual attention. " The childrenmay receive a good deal of individual attention from one another in theshape of outspoken reproach, ruthless ridicule, and violent resistanceto their attempts at aggression; but the parental despots are compelledby the multitude of their subjects to resort to political rather thanpersonal rule, and to spread their attempts at moral monster-making overso many children, that each child has enough freedom, and enough sportin the prophylactic process of laughing at its elders behind theirbacks, to escape with much less damage than the single child. In a largeschool the system may be bad; but the personal influence of the headmaster 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 theindividual scholar in the intimate way that, for example, the motherof a single child can, than the prime minister has of working on theaffections of any individual voter. 

Children as Nuisances

Experienced parents, when children's rights are preached to them, verynaturally 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 whatthey like. The two cases are the same. The adult who is nasty is notallowed to do what he likes: neither can the child who likes to benasty. There is no difference in principle between the rights of achild and those of an adult: the difference in their cases is one ofcircumstance. An adult is not supposed to be punished except by processof law; nor, when he is so punished, is the person whom he has injuredallowed to act as judge, jury, and executioner. It is true thatemployers do act in this way every day to their workpeople; but this isnot a justified and intended part of the situation: it is an abuseof Capitalism which nobody defends in principle. As between child andparent or nurse it is not argued about because it is inevitable. Youcannot hold an impartial judicial inquiry every time a child misbehavesitself. To allow the child to misbehave without instantly making itunpleasantly conscious of the fact would be to spoil it. The adult hastherefore to take action of some sort with nothing but his conscienceto shield the child from injustice or unkindness. The action may be atorrent of scolding culminating in a furious smack causing terrorand pain, or it may be a remonstrance causing remorse, or it may be asarcasm causing shame and humiliation, or it may be a sermon causing thechild to believe that it is a little reprobate on the road to hell. Thechild has no defence in any case except the kindness and conscience ofthe adult; and the adult had better not forget this; for it involves aheavy responsibility. 

And now comes our difficulty. The responsibility, being so heavy, cannotbe discharged by persons of feeble character or intelligence. And yetpeople of high character and intelligence cannot be plagued with thecare of children. A child is a restless, noisy little animal, withan insatiable appetite for knowledge, and consequently a maddeningpersistence in asking questions. If the child is to remain in the roomwith a highly intelligent and sensitive adult, it must be told, and ifnecessary forced, to sit still and not speak, which is injurious toits health, unnatural, unjust, and therefore cruel and selfish beyondtoleration. Consequently the highly intelligent and sensitive adulthands the child over to a nurserymaid who has no nerves and cantherefore stand more noise, but who has also no scruples, and maytherefore be very bad company for the child. 

Here we have come to the central fact of the question: a fact nobodyavows, which is yet the true explanation of the monstrous system ofchild imprisonment and torture which we disguise under such hypocrisiesas education, training, formation of character and the rest of it. Thisfact is simply that a child is a nuisance to a grown-up person. Whatis more, the nuisance becomes more and more intolerable as the grown-upperson becomes more cultivated, more sensitive, and more deeply engagedin the highest methods of adult work. The child at play is noisy andought to be noisy: Sir Isaac Newton at work is quiet and ought to bequiet. And the child should spend most of its time at play, whilst theadult should spend most of his time at work. I am not now writing onbehalf of persons who coddle themselves into a ridiculous condition ofnervous feebleness, and at last imagine themselves unable to workunder conditions of bustle which to healthy people are cheerful andstimulating. I am sure that if people had to choose between living wherethe noise of children never stopped and where it was never heard, allthe goodnatured and sound people would prefer the incessant noise to theincessant silence. But that choice is not thrust upon us by the natureof things. There is no reason why children and adults should not seejust 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 yourchild to a boarding school (which means getting rid of it altogether onmore or less hypocritical pretences) and keeping it continually at home. Most working folk today either send their children to day schools orturn them out of doors. This solves the problem for the parents. It doesnot solve it for the children, any more than the tethering of a goat ina field or the chasing of an unlicensed dog into the streets solvesit for the goat or the dog; but it shews that in no class are peoplewilling to endure the society of their children, and consequentlythat it is an error to believe that the family provides children withedifying adult society, or that the family is a social unit. The familyis in that, as in so many other respects, a humbug. Old people and youngpeople cannot walk at the same pace without distress and final loss ofhealth to one of the parties. When they are sitting indoors they cannotendure the same degrees of temperature and the same supplies offresh air. Even if the main factors of noise, restlessness, andinquisitiveness are left out of account, children can stand withindifference sights, sounds, smells, and disorders that would make anadult of fifty utterly miserable; whilst on the other hand suchadults find a tranquil happiness in conditions which to children meanunspeakable boredom. And since our system is nevertheless to pack themall into the same house and pretend that they are happy, and that thisparticular sort of happiness is the foundation of virtue, it is foundthat in discussing family life we never speak of actual adults or actualchildren, or of realities of any sort, but always of ideals such asThe Home, a Mother's Influence, a Father's Care, Filial Piety, Duty, Affection, Family Life, etc. Etc. , which are no doubt very comfortingphrases, but which beg the question of what a home and a mother'sinfluence 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 doesthe ordinary bread-winning father spend in the company of his childrenor even in the same building with them? The home may be a thieves'kitchen, the mother a procuress, the father a violent drunkard; or themother and father may be fashionable people who see their children threeor four times a year during the holidays, and then not oftener thanthey can help, living meanwhile in daily and intimate contact with theirvalets and lady's-maids, whose influence and care are often dominant inthe household. Affection, as distinguished from simple kindliness, mayor may not exist: when it does it either depends on qualities in theparties that would produce it equally if they were of no kin to oneanother, 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 notmerely grown-up children) and creatures so relatively selfish and cruelas children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot becalled natural: in fact the evidence shews that it is easier to love thecompany of a dog than of a commonplace child between the ages of six andthe beginnings of controlled maturity; for women who cannot bear to beseparated from their pet dogs send their children to boarding schoolscheerfully. They may say and even believe that in allowing theirchildren to leave home they are sacrificing themselves for theirchildren's good; but there are very few pet dogs who would not bethe better for a month or two spent elsewhere than in a lady's lap orroasting on a drawingroom hearthrug. Besides, to allege that childrenare better continually away from home is to give up the whole popularsentimental theory of the family; yet the dogs are kept and the childrenare banished. 

Child Fanciers

There is, however, a good deal of spurious family affection. There isthe clannishness that will make a dozen brothers and sisters who quarrelfuriously among themselves close up their ranks and make common causeagainst a brother-in-law or a sister-in-law. And there is a strong senseof property in children, which often makes mothers and fathers bitterlyjealous of allowing anyone else to interfere with their children, whomthey may none the less treat very badly. And there is an extremelydangerous craze for children which leads certain people to establishorphanages and baby farms and schools, seizing any pretext for fillingtheir houses with children exactly as some eccentric old ladies andgentlemen fill theirs with cats. In such places the children are thevictims of all the caprices of doting affection and all the excessesof lascivious cruelty. Yet the people who have this morbid craze seldomhave any difficulty in finding victims. Parents and guardians are soworried by children and so anxious to get rid of them that anyone whois willing to take them off their hands is welcomed and whitewashed. The very people who read with indignation of Squeers and Creakle in thenovels of Dickens are quite ready to hand over their own childrento Squeers and Creakle, and to pretend that Squeers and Creakleare monsters of the past. But read the autobiography of Stanley thetraveller, 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 andread, stop short of being positively sickening, dare not tell the wholetruth about the people to whom children are handed over on educationalpretexts. Not very long ago a schoolmaster in Ireland was murdered byhis boys; and for reasons which were never made public it was atfirst decided not to prosecute the murderers. Yet all these floggingschoolmasters and orphanage fiends and baby farmers are "lovers ofchildren. " They are really child fanciers (like bird fanciers or dogfanciers) by irresistible natural predilection, never happy unless theyare surrounded by their victims, and always certain to make their livingby accepting the custody of children, no matter how many alternativeoccupations may be available. And bear in mind that they are onlythe 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 prosaicintervals between the moments of affectionate impulse is just thatfeeling that leads them to avoid their care and constant company as aburden beyond bearing, and to pretend that the places they send them toare well conducted, beneficial, and indispensable to the success of thechildren in after life. The true cry of the kind mother after her littlerosary of kisses is "Run away, darling. " It is nicer than "Holdyour noise, you young devil; or it will be the worse for you"; butfundamentally it means the same thing: that if you compel an adult anda child to live in one another's company either the adult or the childwill be miserable. There is nothing whatever unnatural or wrong orshocking in this fact; and there is no harm in it if only it be sensiblyfaced and provided for. The mischief that it does at present isproduced by our efforts to ignore it, or to smother it under a heap ofsentimental lies and false pretences. 

Childhood as a State of Sin

Unfortunately all this nonsense tends to accumulate as we become moresympathetic. In many families it is still the custom to treat childhoodfrankly as a state of sin, and impudently proclaim the monstrousprinciple that little children should be seen and not heard, and toenforce a set of prison rules designed solely to make cohabitationwith children as convenient as possible for adults without the smallestregard for the interests, either remote or immediate, of thechildren. This system tends to produce a tough, rather brutal, stupid, unscrupulous class, with a fixed idea that all enjoyment consists inundetected sinning; and in certain phases of civilization people of thiskind are apt to get the upper hand of more amiable and conscientiousraces and classes. They have the ferocity of a chained dog, and areproud of it. But the end of it is that they are always in chains, even at the height of their military or political success: theywin everything on condition that they are afraid to enjoy it. Theircivilizations rest on intimidation, which is so necessary to them thatwhen they cannot find anybody brave enough to intimidate them theyintimidate themselves and live in a continual moral and political panic. In the end they get found out and bullied. But that is not the pointthat concerns us here, which is, that they are in some respects betterbrought up than the children of sentimental people who are alwaysanxious and miserable about their duty to their children, and who endby neither making their children happy nor having a tolerable life forthemselves. A selfish tyrant you know where to have, and he (or she) atleast does not confuse your affections; but a conscientious and kindlymeddler may literally worry you out of your senses. It is fortunate thatonly very few parents are capable of doing what they conceive their dutycontinuously or even at all, and that still fewer are tough enough toride roughshod over their children at home. 

School

But please observe the limitation "at home. " What private amateurparental enterprise cannot do may be done very effectively by organizedprofessional enterprise in large institutions established for thepurpose. And it is to such professional enterprise that parents handover their children when they can afford it. They send their childrento school; and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended forinnocent 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, forinstance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders andthe governor (who of course would not be warders and governors if theycould write readable books), and beaten or otherwise tormented if youcannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the prison youare not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm orinterest on subjects that they dont understand and dont care about, andare therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In aprison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains;and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellowprisoners. In a school you have none of these advantages. With theworld's bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the verymanna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to reada hideous imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannotwrite: a book from which no human being can learn anything: a bookwhich, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful senseread, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight ofa book all the rest of your life. With millions of acres of woods andvalleys and hills and wind and air and birds and streams and fishes andall sorts of instructive and healthy things easily accessible, or withstreets and shop windows and crowds and vehicles and all sorts of citydelights at the door, you are forced to sit, not in a room with somehuman grace and comfort or furniture and decoration, but in a stalledpound with a lot of other children, beaten if you talk, beaten if youmove, beaten if you cannot prove by answering idiotic questions thateven when you escaped from the pound and from the eye of your gaoler, you were still agonizing over his detestable sham books instead ofdaring to live. And your childish hatred of your gaoler and flogger isnothing to his adult hatred of you; for he is a slave forced to endureyour society for his daily bread. You have not even the satisfaction ofknowing how you are torturing him and how he loathes you; and you giveyourself unnecessary pains to annoy him with furtive tricks and spitefuldoing of forbidden things. No wonder he is sometimes provoked tofiendish outbursts of wrath. No wonder men of downright sense, like DrJohnson, admit that under such circumstances children will not learnanything unless they are so cruelly beaten that they make desperateefforts to memorize words and phrases to escape flagellation. It is aghastly business, quite beyond words, this schooling. 

And now I hear cries of protest arising all round. First my ownschoolmasters, or their ghosts, asking whether I was cruelly beaten atschool? No; but then I did not learn anything at school. Dr Johnson'sschoolmaster presumably did care enough whether Sam learned anything tobeat him savagely enough to force him to lame his mind--forJohnson's great mind _was_ lamed--by learning his lessons. None of myschoolmasters really cared a rap (or perhaps it would be fairer to themto say that their employers did not care a rap and therefore did notgive them the necessary caning powers) whether I learnt my lessons ornot, provided my father paid my schooling bill, the collection of whichwas the real object of the school. Consequently I did not learn myschool lessons, having much more important ones in hand, with the resultthat I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in tavernsas Johnson did when he should have been shaking England with the thunderof his spirit. My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no goodwhatever: it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt; but Iescaped Squeers and Creakle just as I escaped Johnson and Carlyle. Andthis is what happens to most of us. We are not effectively coerced tolearn: we stave off punishment as far as we can by lying and trickeryand guessing and using our wits; and when this does not suffice wescribble impositions, or suffer extra imprisonments--"keeping in" wasthe phrase in my time--or let a master strike us with a cane and fallback on our pride at being able to hear it physically (he not beingallowed to hit us too hard) to outface the dishonor we should have beentaught to die rather than endure. And so idleness and worthlessness onthe one hand and a pretence of coercion on the other became a despicableroutine. If my schoolmasters had been really engaged in educating meinstead of painfully earning their bread by keeping me from annoying myelders they would have turned me out of the school, telling me that Iwas thoroughly disloyal to it; that I had no intention of learning; thatI was mocking and distracting the boys who did wish to learn; that I wasa liar and a shirker and a seditious little nuisance; and that nothingcould injure me in character and degrade their occupation more thanallowing me (much less forcing me) to remain in the school under suchconditions. But in order to get expelled, it was necessary commita crime of such atrocity that the parents of other boys wouldhave threatened to remove their sons sooner than allow them to beschoolfellows with the delinquent. I can remember only one case in whichsuch a penalty was threatened; and in that case the culprit, a boarder, had kissed a housemaid, or possibly, being a handsome youth, been kissedby her. She did not kiss me; and nobody ever dreamt of expelling me. Thetruth was, a boy meant just so much a year to the institution. That waswhy he was kept there against his will. That was why he was kept therewhen his expulsion would have been an unspeakable relief and benefitboth 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 anattitude was impossible. The masters must have hated the school muchmore than the boys did. Just as you cannot imprison a man withoutimprisoning a warder to see that he does not escape, the warder beingtied to the prison as effectually by the fear of unemployment andstarvation as the prisoner is by the bolts and bars, so these poorschoolmasters, with their small salaries and large classes, were as muchprisoners as we were, and much more responsible and anxious ones. Theycould not impose the heroic attitude on their employers; nor would theyhave been able to obtain places as schoolmasters if their habits hadbeen heroic. For the best of them their employment was provisional: theylooked forward to escaping from it into the pulpit. The ablest and mostimpatient of them were often so irritated by the awkward, slow-witted, slovenly boys: that is, the ones that required special consideration andpatient treatment, that they vented their irritation on them ruthlessly, nothing being easier than to entrap or bewilder such a boy into giving apretext for punishing him. 

My Scholastic Acquirements

The results, as far as I was concerned, were what might have beenexpected. My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anythingbut Latin and Greek. When I went there as a very small boy I knew a gooddeal of Latin grammar which I had been taught in a few weeks privatelyby my uncle. When I had been several years at school this same uncleexamined me and discovered that the net result of my schooling was thatI had forgotten what he had taught me, and had learnt nothing else. Tothis day, though I can still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of theold paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticksto me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I couldtranslate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greaterpart of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, as to classical education, another Shakespear. I can read French as easily as English; and underpressure of necessity I can turn to account some scraps of German anda little operatic Italian; but these I was never taught at school. Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirtystories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity asobscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all theblackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards. Andif I had been a boarder at an English public school instead of a day boyat 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 melancholyacquiescence in all this (which everybody who has been at an ordinaryschool will recognize as true), I have still to meet the much moresincere protests of the handful of people who have a natural genius for"bringing up" children. I shall be asked with kindly scorn whether Ihave heard of Froebel and Pestalozzi, whether I know the work that isbeing done by Miss Mason and the Dottoressa Montessori or, best of allas I think, the Eurythmics School of Jacques Dalcroze at Hellerau nearDresden. Jacques Dalcroze, like Plato, believes in saturating his pupilswith music. They walk to music, play to music, work to music, obey drillcommands that would bewilder a guardsman to music, think to music, live to music, get so clearheaded about music that they can move theirseveral limbs each in a different metre until they become complicatedliving magazines of cross rhythms, and, what is more, make musicfor others to do all these things to. Stranger still, though JacquesDalcroze, like all these great teachers, is the completest of tyrants, knowing what is right and that he must and will have the lesson just soor else break his heart (not somebody else's, observe), yet his schoolis so fascinating that every woman who sees it exclaims "Oh, why was Inot taught like this!" and elderly gentlemen excitedly enrol themselvesas students and distract classes of infants by their desperate endeavorsto beat two in a bar with one hand and three with the other, and startoff on earnest walks round the room, taking two steps backward wheneverMonsieur Daleroze calls out "Hop!" Oh yes: I know all about thesewonderful schools that you cannot keep children or even adults out of, and these teachers whom their pupils not only obey without coercion, butadore. And if you will tell me roughly how many Masons and Montessorisand Dalcrozes you think you can pick up in Europe for salaries of fromthirty shillings to five pounds a week, I will estimate your chancesof converting your millions of little scholastic hells into littlescholastic heavens. If you are a distressed gentlewoman starting to makea living, you can still open a little school; and you can easily buy asecondhand brass plate inscribed PESTALOZZIAN INSTITUTE and nail it toyour door, though you have no more idea of who Pestalozzi was and whathe advocated or how he did it than the manager of a hotel which beganas a Hydropathic has of the water cure. Or you can buy a cheaper plateinscribed KINDERGARTEN, and imagine, or leave others to imagine, thatFroebel is the governing genius of your little _creche_. No doubt thenew brass plates are being inscribed Montessori Institute, and will beused when the Dotteressa is no longer with us by all the Mrs Pipchinsand Mrs Wilfers throughout this unhappy land. 

I will go further, and admit that the brass plates may not all befrauds. I will tell you that one of my friends was led to genuinelove and considerable knowledge of classical literature by an Irishschoolmaster whom you would call a hedge schoolmaster (he would not beallowed to teach anything now) and that it took four years of Harrowto obliterate that knowledge and change the love into loathing. Anotherfriend of mine who keeps a school in the suburbs, and who deeplydeplores my "prejudice against schoolmasters, " has offered to accept mychallenge to tell his pupils that they are as free to get up and go outof the school at any moment as their parents are to get up and go outof a theatre where my plays are being performed. Even among my ownschoolmasters I can recollect a few whose classes interested me, andwhom I should certainly have pestered for information and instructionif I could have got into any decent human relationship with them, andif they had not been compelled by their position to defend themselves ascarefully against such advances as against furtive attempts to hurt themaccidentally in the football field or smash their hats with a clod frombehind a wall. But these rare cases actually do more harm than good; forthey encourage us to pretend that all schoolmasters are like that. Of what use is it to us that there are always somewhere two or threeteachers of children whose specific genius for their occupation triumphsover our tyrannous system and even finds in it its opportunity? For thatmatter, it is possible, if difficult, to find a solicitor, or even ajudge, who has some notion of what law means, a doctor with a glimmeringof science, an officer who understands duty and discipline, and aclergyman with an inkling of religion, though there are nothing likeenough of them to go round. But even the few who, like Ibsen's MrsSolness, have "a genius for nursing the souls of little children" arelike angels forced to work in prisons instead of in heaven; and evenat that they are mostly underpaid and despised. That friend of mine whowent from the hedge schoolmaster to Harrow once saw a schoolmaster rushfrom an elementary school in pursuit of a boy and strike him. My friend, not considering that the unfortunate man was probably goadedbeyond endurance, smote the schoolmaster and blackened his eye. Theschoolmaster appealed to the law; and my friend found himself waitingnervously in the Hammersmith Police Court to answer for his breach ofthe peace. In his anxiety he asked a police officer what would happento 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 hewasnt, " said the constable. "He was a schoolmaster" said my friend. "Twopounds" said the officer; and two pounds it was. The blood money waspaid cheerfully; and I have ever since advised elementary schoolmastersto qualify themselves in the art of self-defence, as the BritishConstitution expresses our national estimate of them by allowing us toblacken three of their eyes for the same price as one of an ordinaryprofessional man. How many Froebels and Pestalozzis and Miss Masons andDoctoress Montessoris would you be likely to get on these terms even ifthey 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 ifit were worked by angels. I do not admit it even at that, just as I donot admit that if the sky fell we should all catch larks. But I donot propose to bother about a supply of specific genius which doesnot exist, and which, if it did exist, could operate only by at oncerecognizing 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 toconvince any reasonable person that the object of the lessons is to keepchildren out of mischief, and not to qualify them for their part in lifeas responsible citizens of a free State. It is not possible to maintainfreedom in any State, no matter how perfect its original constitution, unless its publicly active citizens know a good deal of constitutionalhistory, law, and political science, with its basis of economics. Ifas much pains had been taken a century ago to make us all understandRicardo's law of rent as to learn our catechisms, the face of the worldwould have been changed for the better. But for that very reason thegreatest care is taken to keep such beneficially subversiveknowledge from us, with the result that in public life we are eitherplace-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 knowsonly the official side of a controversy knows less than nothing of itsnature. The abler a schoolmaster is, the more dangerous he is to hispupils unless they have the fullest opportunity of hearing anotherequally able person do his utmost to shake his authority and convict himof error. 

At present such teaching is very unpopular. It does not exist inschools; but every adult who derives his knowledge of public affairsfrom the newspapers can take in, at the cost of an extra halfpenny, twopapers of opposite politics. Yet the ordinary man so dislikes having hismind unsettled, as he calls it, that he angrily refuses to allow a paperwhich dissents from his views to be brought into his house. Even at hisclub he resents seeing it, and excludes it if it happens to run counterto the opinions of all the members. The result is that his opinions arenot worth considering. A churchman who never reads The Freethinker verysoon has no more real religion than the atheist who never reads TheChurch Times. The attitude is the same in both cases: they want to hearnothing good of their enemies; consequently they remain enemies andsuffer from bad blood all their lives; whereas men who know theiropponents and understand their case, quite commonly respect and likethem, and always learn something from them. 

Here, again, as at so many points, we come up against the abuse ofschools to keep people in ignorance and error, so that they may beincapable of successful revolt against their industrial slavery. Themost important simple fundamental economic truth to impress on achild in complicated civilizations like ours is the truth that whoeverconsumes goods or services without producing by personal effort theequivalent of what he or she consumes, inflicts on the communityprecisely the same injury that a thief produces, and would, in anyhonest State, be treated as a thief, however full his or her pocketsmight be of money made by other people. The nation that first teachesits children that truth, instead of flogging them if they discoverit for themselves, may have to fight all the slaves of all the othernations to begin with; but it will beat them as easily as an unburdenedman with his hands free and with all his energies in full play can beatan invalid who has to carry another invalid on his back. 

This, however, is not an evil produced by the denial of children'srights, nor is it inherent in the nature of schools. I mention it onlybecause it would be folly to call for a reform of our schools withouttaking account of the corrupt resistance which awaits the reformer. 

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

Taboo in Schools

The suppression of economic knowledge, disastrous as it is, is quiteintelligible, its corrupt motive being as clear as the motive of aburglar for concealing his jemmy from a policeman. But the other greatsuppression in our schools, the suppression of the subject of sex, is acase of taboo. In mankind, the lower the type, and the less cultivatedthe mind, the less courage there is to face important subjectsobjectively. The ablest and most highly cultivated people continuallydiscuss religion, politics, and sex: it is hardly an exaggeration to saythat they discuss nothing else with fully-awakened interest. Commonerand less cultivated people, even when they form societies fordiscussion, make a rule that politics and religion are not to bementioned, and take it for granted that no decent person would attemptto discuss sex. The three subjects are feared because they rouse thecrude passions which call for furious gratification in murder and rapineat worst, and, at best, lead to quarrels and undesirable states ofconsciousness. 

Even when this excuse of bad manners, ill temper, and brutishness (forthat is what it comes to) compels us to accept it from those adultsamong whom political and theological discussion does as a matter of factlead to the drawing of knives and pistols, and sex discussion leads toobscenity, it has no application to children except as an imperativereason for training them to respect other people's opinions, and toinsist on respect for their own in these as in other important matterswhich are equally dangerous: for example, money. And in any casethere are decisive reasons; superior, like the reasons forsuspending conventional reticences between doctor and patient, to allconsiderations of mere decorum, for giving proper instruction in thefacts of sex. Those who object to it (not counting coarse people whothoughtlessly seize every opportunity of affecting and parading afictitious delicacy) are, in effect, advocating ignorance as a safeguardagainst precocity. If ignorance were practicable there would besomething to be said for it up to the age at which ignorance is a dangerinstead of a safeguard. Even as it is, it seems undesirable that anyspecial emphasis should be given to the subject, whether by way ofdelicacy and poetry or too impressive warning. But the plain fact isthat in refusing to allow the child to be taught by qualified unrelatedelders (the parents shrink from the lesson, even when they are otherwisequalified, because their own relation to the child makes the subjectimpossible between them) we are virtually arranging to have our childrentaught by other children in guilty secrets and unclean jests. And thatsettles the question for all sensible people. 

The dogmatic objection, the sheer instinctive taboo which rules thesubject out altogether as indecent, has no age limit. It means thatat no matter what age a woman consents to a proposal of marriage, sheshould do so in ignorance of the relation she is undertaking. When thisactually happens (and apparently it does happen oftener than would seempossible) a horrible fraud is being practiced on both the man and thewoman. He is led to believe that she knows what she is promising, andthat he is in no danger of finding himself bound to a woman to whomhe is eugenically antipathetic. She contemplates nothing but suchaffectionate relations as may exist between her and her nearest kinsmen, and has no knowledge of the condition which, if not foreseen, must comeas an amazing revelation and a dangerous shock, ending possibly in thediscovery that the marriage has been an irreparable mistake. Nothing canjustify such a risk. There may be people incapable of understanding thatthe right to know all there is to know about oneself is a natural humanright that sweeps away all the pretences of others to tamper with one'sconsciousness in order to produce what they choose to consider a goodcharacter. But they must here bow to the plain mischievousness ofentrapping people into contracts on which the happiness of their wholelives 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 tothe positive side of my case. I mean the person who tells me thatmy schooldays belong to a bygone order of educational ideas andinstitutions, 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 thisstatement the lie. Some years ago I lectured in Oxford on the subjectof Education. A friend to whom I mentioned my intention said, "You knownothing of modern education: schools are not now what they were whenyou were a boy. " I immediately procured the time sheets of half a dozenmodern schools, and found, as I expected, that they might all have beenmy old school: there was no real difference. I may mention, too, thatI have visited modern schools, and observed that there is a tendency tohang printed pictures in an untidy and soulless manner on the walls, and occasionally to display on the mantel-shelf a deplorable glass casecontaining certain objects which might possibly, if placed in the handsof the pupils, give them some practical experience of the weight ofa pound and the length of an inch. And sometimes a scoundrel who hasrifled a bird's nest or killed a harmless snake encourages the childrento go and do likewise by putting his victims into an imitation nest andbottle and exhibiting them as aids to "Nature study. " A suggestion thatNature is worth study would certainly have staggered my schoolmasters;so perhaps I may admit a gleam of progress here. But as any child whoattempted to handle these dusty objects would probably be caned, I donot attach any importance to such modernities in school furniture. The school remains what it was in my boyhood, because its real objectremains what it was. And that object, I repeat, is to keep the childrenout of mischief: mischief meaning for the most part worrying thegrown-ups. 

What is to be Done?

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

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

I must not pretend, then, that I have a system ready to replace allthe other systems. Obstructing the way of the proper organization ofchildhood, as of everything else, lies our ridiculous misdistributionof the national income, with its accompanying class distinctions andimposition of snobbery on children as a necessary part of their socialtraining. The result of our economic folly is that we are a nation ofundesirable acquaintances; and the first object of all our institutionsfor children is segregation. If, for example, our children were set freeto 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 seethat every child wore a badge indicating its class in society, and thatevery child seen speaking to another child with a lower-class badge, orany child wearing a higher badge than that allotted to it by, say, theCollege of Heralds, should immediately be skinned alive with a birchrod. It might even be insisted that girls with high-class badges shouldbe attended by footmen, grooms, or even military escorts. In short, there is hardly any limit to the follies with which our Commercialismwould infect any system that it would tolerate at all. But somethinglike a change of heart is still possible; and since all the evils ofsnobbery and segregation are rampant in our schools at present we may aswell 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 ofsociety over the child. Its rights, being clearly those of any otherhuman being, are summed up in the right to live: that is, to have allthe conclusive arguments that prove that it would be better dead, thatit is a child of wrath, that the population is already excessive, thatthe pains of life are greater than its pleasures, that its sacrifice ina hospital or laboratory experiment might save millions of lives, etc. Etc. Etc. , put out of the question, and its existence acceptedas necessary and sacred, all theories to the contrary notwithstanding, whether by Calvin or Schopenhauer or Pasteur or the nearest person witha taste for infanticide. And this right to live includes, and in factis, the right to be what the child likes and can, to do what it likesand can, to make what it likes and can, to think what it likes andcan, to smash what it dislikes and can, and generally to behave in analtogether unaccountable manner within the limits imposed by the similarrights of its neighbors. And the rights of society over it clearlyextend to requiring it to qualify itself to live in society withoutwasting other peoples time: that is, it must know the rules of the road, be able to read placards and proclamations, fill voting papers, composeand send letters and telegrams, purchase food and clothing andrailway tickets for itself, count money and give and take change, and, generally, know how many beans made five. It must know some law, were itonly a simple set of commandments, some political economy, agricultureenough to shut the gates of fields with cattle in them and not totrample on growing crops, sanitation enough not to defile its haunts, and religion enough to have some idea of why it is allowed its rightsand why it must respect the rights of others. And the rest of itseducation must consist of anything else it can pick up; for beyond thissociety cannot go with any certainty, and indeed can only go this farrather apologetically and provisionally, as doing the best it can onvery uncertain ground. 

Should Children Earn their Living?

Now comes the question how far children should be asked to contributeto the support of the community. In approaching it we must put asidethe considerations that now induce all humane and thoughtful politicalstudents to agitate for the uncompromising abolition of child laborunder our capitalist system. It is not the least of the curses of thatsystem that it will bequeath to future generations a mass of legislationto prevent capitalists from "using up nine generations of men in onegeneration, " as they began by doing until they were restrained by law atthe suggestion of Robert Owen, the founder of English Socialism. Most ofthis legislation will become an insufferable restraint upon freedomand variety of action when Capitalism goes the way of Druidic humansacrifice (a much less slaughterous institution). There is every reasonwhy a child should not be allowed to work for commercial profit or forthe support of its parents at the expense of its own future; but thereis no reason whatever why a child should not do some work for its ownsake and that of the community if it can be shewn that both it and thecommunity will be the better for it. 

Children's Happiness

Also it is important to put the happiness of the children rathercarefully in its place, which is really not a front place. Theunsympathetic, selfish, hard people who regard happiness as a veryexceptional indulgence to which children are by no means entitled, though they may be allowed a very little of it on their birthdays or atChristmas, are sometimes better parents in effect than those who imaginethat children are as capable of happiness as adults. Adults habituallyexaggerate their own capacity in that direction grossly; yet most adultscan stand an allowance of happiness that would be quite thrown away onchildren. The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to botherabout whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied personis neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which ispleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it. That is why itis necessary to happiness that one should be tired. Music after dinneris pleasant: music before breakfast is so unpleasant as to be clearlyunnatural. To people who are not overworked holidays are a nuisance. To people who are, and who can afford them, they are a troublesomenecessity. 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 conceivedas a perpetual holiday, and that whoever is not born to an independentincome is striving for one or longing for one because it gives holidaysfor life. To which I reply, first, that heaven, as conventionallyconceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, thoughplenty of people have described a day at the seaside; and that thegenuine popular verdict on it is expressed in the proverb "Heaven forholiness and Hell for company. " Second, I point out that the wretchedpeople who have independent incomes and no useful occupation, do themost amazingly disagreeable and dangerous things to make themselvestired and hungry in the evening. When they are not involved in what theycall sport, they are doing aimlessly what other people have to be paidto do: driving horses and motor cars; trying on dresses and walking upand down to shew them off; and acting as footmen and housemaids to royalpersonages. The sole and obvious cause of the notion that idleness isdelightful 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 prisonin which work is a punishment and a curse. In avowed prisons, hardlabor, the only alleviation of a prisoner's lot, is treated as anaggravation of his punishment; and everything possible is done tointensify the prisoner's inculcated and unnatural notion that work is anevil. In industry we are overworked and underfed prisoners. Under suchabsurd circumstances our judgment of things becomes as perverted as ourhabits. If we were habitually underworked and overfed, our notionof heaven would be a place where everybody worked strenuously fortwenty-four hours a day and never got anything to eat. 

Once realize that a perpetual holiday is beyond human endurance, andthat "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" and it willbe 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 aRight to Work Bill. 

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

Productive work for children has the advantage that its discipline isthe discipline of impersonal necessity, not that of wanton personalcoercion. The eagerness of children in our industrial districts toescape from school to the factory is not caused by lighter tasks orshorter 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 dignifiedLaws of Life to which all flesh is subject. 

University Schoolboyishness

Older children might do a good deal before beginning their collegiateeducation. What is the matter with our universities is that all thestudents are schoolboys, whereas it is of the very essence of universityeducation that they should be men. The function of a university is notto teach things that can now be taught as well or better by UniversityExtension lectures or by private tutors or modern correspondence classeswith gramophones. We go to them to be socialized; to acquire the hallmark of communal training; to become citizens of the world instead ofinmates of the enlarged rabbit hutches we call homes; to learn mannersand become unchallengeable ladies and gentlemen. The social pressurewhich effects these changes should be that of persons who have facedthe full responsibilities of adults as working members of the generalcommunity, not that of a barbarous rabble of half emancipated schoolboysand unemancipable pedants. It is true that in a reasonable state ofsociety this outside experience would do for us very completely what theuniversity does now so corruptly that we tolerate its bad manners onlybecause they are better than no manners at all. But the university willalways exist in some form as a community of persons desirous of pushingtheir culture to the highest pitch they are capable of, not as solitarystudents reading in seclusion, but as members of a body of individualsall pursuing culture, talking culture, thinking culture, above all, criticizing culture. If such persons are to read and talk and criticizeto any purpose, they must know the world outside the university at leastas well as the shopkeeper in the High Street does. And this is justwhat they do not know at present. You may say of them, paraphrasingMr. Kipling, "What do they know of Plato that only Plato know?" If ouruniversities would exclude everybody who had not earned a living by hisor her own exertions for at least a couple of years, their effect wouldbe vastly improved. 

The New Laziness

The child of the future, then, if there is to be any future but one ofdecay, will work more or less for its living from an early age; andin doing so it will not shock anyone, provided there be no longer anyreason to associate the conception of children working for their livingwith infants toiling in a factory for ten hours a day or boys drudgingfrom nine to six under gas lamps in underground city offices. Lads andlasses in their teens will probably be able to produce as much as themost expensive person now costs in his own person (it is retinue thateats up the big income) without working too hard or too long for quiteas much happiness as they can enjoy. The question to be balanced thenwill be, not how soon people should be put to work, but how soon theyshould be released from any obligation of the kind. A life's work islike a day's work: it can begin early and leave off early or begin lateand leave off late, or, as with us, begin too early and never leave offat all, obviously the worst of all possible plans. In any event wemust finally reckon work, not as the curse our schools and prisons andcapitalist profit factories make it seem today, but as a prime necessityof a tolerable existence. And if we cannot devise fresh wants as fastas we develop the means of supplying them, there will come a scarcityof the needed, cut-and-dried, appointed work that is always ready toeverybody's hand. It may have to be shared out among people all of whomwant more of it. And then a new sort of laziness will become the bugbearof society: the laziness that refuses to face the mental toil andadventure of making work by inventing new ideas or extending the domainof knowledge, and insists on a ready-made routine. It may come toforcing people to retire before they are willing to make way for youngerones: that is, to driving all persons of a certain age out of industry, leaving them to find something experimental to occupy them on pain ofperpetual holiday. Men will then try to spend twenty thousand a yearfor the sake of having to earn it. Instead of being what we are now, thecheapest and nastiest of the animals, we shall be the costliest, mostfastidious, and best bred. In short, there is no end to the astonishingthings that may happen when the curse of Adam becomes first a blessingand then an incurable habit. And in that day we must not grudge childrentheir share of it. 

The Infinite School Task

The question of children's work, however, is only a question of what thechild ought to do for the community. How highly it should qualify itselfis another matter. But most of the difficulty of inducing childrento learn would disappear if our demands became not only definite butfinite. When learning is only an excuse for imprisonment, it is aninstrument of torture which becomes more painful the more progress ismade. Thus when you have forced a child to learn the Church Catechism, a document profound beyond the comprehension of most adults, you aresometimes at a standstill for something else to teach; and you thereforekeep the wretched child repeating its catechism again and again untilyou 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 alesson that you know yourself, there is a tendency to keep repeating thealready learnt lesson rather than break new ground. At school I beganwith a fairly complete knowledge of Latin grammar in the childish senseof being able to repeat all the paradigms; and I was kept at this, orrather kept in a class where the master never asked me to do it becausehe knew I could, and therefore devoted himself to trapping the boys whocould not, until I finally forgot most of it. But when progress tookplace, what did it mean? First it meant Caesar, with the foreknowledgethat to master Caesar meant only being set at Virgil, with theculminating horror of Greek and Homer in reserve at the end of that. Ipreferred Caesar, because his statement that Gaul is divided into threeparts, though neither interesting nor true, was the only Latin sentenceI could translate at sight: therefore the longer we stuck at Caesar thebetter I was pleased. Just so do less classically educated children seenothing in the mastery of addition but the beginning of subtraction, andso on through multiplication and division and fractions, with the blackcloud 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 insiston his learning music, and proceed to hit him if he cannot tell you theyear 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 theschoolmaster has a right to force every child into an attempt to becomePorson and Bentley, Leibnitz and Newton, all rolled into one. This isthe tradition of the oldest grammar schools. In our times an even morehorrible and cynical claim has been made for the right to drive boysthrough compulsory games in the playing fields until they are too muchexhausted physically to do anything but drop off to sleep. This issupposed to protect them from vice; but as it also protects them frompoetry, literature, music, meditation and prayer, it may be dismissedwith the obvious remark that if boarding schools are places whosekeepers are driven to such monstrous measures lest more abominablethings should happen, then the sooner boarding schools are violentlyabolished the better. It is true that society may make physical claimson the child as well as mental ones: the child must learn to walk, touse a knife and fork, to swim, to ride a bicycle, to acquire sufficientpower of self-defence to make an attack on it an arduous and uncertainenterprise, perhaps to fly. What as a matter of common-sense it clearlyhas not a right to do is to make this an excuse for keeping the childslaving for ten hours at physical exercises on the ground that it is notyet 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 itseducation can end only with its life and will not even then be complete. Compulsory completion of education is the last folly of a rottenand desperate civilization. It is the rattle in its throat beforedissolution. All we can fairly do is to prescribe certain definiteacquirements and accomplishments as qualifications for certainemployments; and to secure them, not by the ridiculous method ofinflicting injuries on the persons who have not yet mastered them, butby attaching certain privileges (not pecuniary) to the employments. 

Most acquirements carry their own privileges with them. Thus a baby hasto be pretty closely guarded and imprisoned because it cannot takecare of itself. It has even to be carried about (the most completeconceivable infringement of its liberty) until it can walk. But nobodygoes on carrying children after they can walk lest they should walk intomischief, though Arab boys make their sisters carry them, as our ownspoiled children sometimes make their nurses, out of mere laziness, because sisters in the East and nurses in the West are kept inservitude. But in a society of equals (the only reasonable andpermanently possible sort of society) children are in much greaterdanger of acquiring bandy legs through being left to walk before theyare 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 towalk; and in precisely the same way freedom of movement in a city isthe reward of learning how to read public notices, and to count and usemoney. The consequences are of course much larger than the mere abilityto read the name of a street or the number of a railway platform and thedestination of a train. When you enable a child to read these, you alsoenable it to read this preface, to the utter destruction, you may quitepossibly think, of its morals and docility. You also expose it to thedanger of being run over by taxicabs and trains. The moral and physicalrisks of education are enormous: every new power a child acquires, from speaking, walking, and co-ordinating its vision, to conqueringcontinents and founding religions, opens up immense new possibilities ofmischief. Teach a child to write and you teach it how to forge: teach itto speak and you teach it how to lie: teach it to walk and you teach ithow to kick its mother to death. 

The great problem of slavery for those whose aim is to maintain itis the problem of reconciling the efficiency of the slave withthe helplessness that keeps him in servitude; and this problem isfortunately not completely soluble; for it is not in fact found possiblefor a duke to treat his solicitor or his doctor as he treats hislaborers, though they are all equally his slaves: the laborer being infact less dependent on his favor than the professional man. Hence it isthat men come to resent, of all things, protection, because it so oftenmeans restriction of their liberty lest they should make a bad useof it. If there are dangerous precipices about, it is much easierand cheaper to forbid people to walk near the edge than to put up aneffective fence: that is why both legislators and parents and the paiddeputies of parents are always inhibiting and prohibiting and punishingand scolding and laming and cramping and delaying progress and growthinstead of making the dangerous places as safe as possible and thenboldly taking and allowing others to take the irreducible minimum ofrisk. 

English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual Cowardice

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

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

The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness

The difficulty with children is that they need protection from risksthey are too young to understand, and attacks they can neither avoidnor resist. You may on academic grounds allow a child to snatch glowingcoals from the fire once. You will not do it twice. The risks ofliberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance andself-helplessness are another matter. Not only children but adultsneed protection from them. At present adults are often exposed to risksoutside their knowledge or beyond their comprehension or powers ofresistance or foresight: for example, we have to look on every dayat marriages or financial speculations that may involve far worseconsequences than burnt fingers. And just as it is part of the businessof 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 forthemselves, it is coming more and more to be seen that this is true notonly of the relation between adults and children, but between adults andadults. We shall not always look on indifferently at foolish marriagesand financial speculations, nor allow dead men to control livecommunities by ridiculous wills and living heirs to squander and ruingreat estates, nor tolerate a hundred other absurd liberties thatwe allow today because we are too lazy to find out the proper way tointerfere. But the interference must be regulated by some theory of theindividual's rights. Though the right to live is absolute, it is notunconditional. If a man is unbearably mischievous, he must be killed. This is a mere matter of necessity, like the killing of a man-eatingtiger in a nursery, a venomous snake in the garden, or a fox in thepoultry yard. No society could be constructed on the assumption thatsuch extermination is a violation of the creature's right to live, andtherefore must not be allowed. And then at once arises the danger intowhich morality has led us: the danger of persecution. One Christianspreading his doctrines may seem more mischievous than a dozen thieves:throw him therefore to the lions. A lying or disobedient child maycorrupt a whole generation and make human Society impossible: thereforethrash the vice out of him. And so on until our whole system ofabortion, intimidation, tyranny, cruelty and the rest is in full swingagain. 

The Common Sense of Toleration

The real safeguard against this is the dogma of Toleration. I need nothere repeat the compact treatise on it which I prepared for the JointCommittee on the Censorship of Stage Plays, and prefixed to The ShewingUp of Blanco Posnet. It must suffice now to say that the present mustnot attempt to schoolmaster the future by pretending to know good fromevil in tendency, or protect citizens against shocks to their opinionsand convictions, moral, political or religious: in other words it mustnot persecute doctrines of any kind, or what is called bad taste, and must insist on all persons facing such shocks as they face frostyweather or any of the other disagreeable, dangerous, or bracingincidents of freedom. The expediency of Toleration has been forced on usby the fact that progressive enlightenment depends on a fair hearing fordoctrines which at first appear seditious, blasphemous, and immoral, andwhich deeply shock people who never think originally, thought being withthem merely a habit and an echo. The deeper ground for Toleration isthe nature of creation, which, as we now know, proceeds by evolution. Evolution finds its way by experiment; and this finding of the wayvaries according to the stage of development reached, from the blindestgroping 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 andintuitive an integration of all these processes in a single brainthat we get the inspired guess of the man of genius and the desperateresolution of the teacher of new truths who is first slain as ablasphemous apostate and then worshipped as a prophet. 

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

The difficulty at present is that though this necessity for Tolerationis a law of political science as well established as the law ofgravitation, our rulers are never taught political science: on thecontrary, they are taught in school that the master tolerates nothingthat is disagreeable to him; that ruling is simply being master; andthat the master's method is the method of violent punishment. And ourcitizens, all school taught, are walking in the same darkness. As Iwrite these lines the Home Secretary is explaining that a man who hasbeen imprisoned for blasphemy must not be released because his remarkswere painful to the feelings of his pious fellow townsmen. Now ithappens that this very Home Secretary has driven many thousands of hisfellow citizens almost beside themselves by the crudity of his notionsof government, and his simple inability to understand why he shouldnot use and make laws to torment and subdue people who do not happento agree with him. In a word, he is not a politician, but a grown-upschoolboy who has at last got a cane in his hand. And as all the rest ofus are in the same condition (except as to command of the cane) the onlyobjection made to his proceedings takes the shape of clamorous demandsthat _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 andimplacable resistance to all law as the only remedy; and the result ofthat speedily is that people welcome any tyranny that will rescue themfrom chaos. But there is really no need to choose between anarchy andtyranny. A quite reasonable state of things is practicable if we proceedon human assumptions and not on academic ones. If adults will franklygive up their claim to know better than children what the purposesof the Life Force are, and treat the child as an experiment likethemselves, and possibly a more successful one, and at the same timerelinquish their monstrous parental claims to personal private propertyin 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 enactingthat any person dictating a piece of conduct to a child or to anyoneelse as the will of God, or as absolutely right, should be dealt withas a blasphemer: as, indeed, guilty of the unpardonable sin against theHoly Ghost. If the penalty were death, it would rid us at once of thatscourge of humanity, the amateur Pope. As an Irish Protestant, I raisethe cry of No Popery with hereditary zest. We are overrun with Popes. From curates and governesses, who may claim a sort of professionalstanding, to parents and uncles and nurserymaids and school teachersand wiseacres generally, there are scores of thousands of human insectsgroping through our darkness by the feeble phosphorescence of their owntails, yet ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on everypossible subject; to explain how and why the universe was made (in myyouth they added the exact date) and the circumstances under whichit will cease to exist; to lay down precise rules of right and wrongconduct; to discriminate infallibly between virtuous and viciouscharacter; and all this with such certainty that they are prepared tovisit all the rigors of the law, and all the ruinous penalties of socialostracism on people, however harmless their actions maybe who ventureto laugh at their monstrous conceit or to pay their assumptions theextravagant compliment of criticizing them. As to children, who shallsay what canings and birchings and terrifyings and threats of hell fireand impositions and humiliations and petty imprisonings and sendingsto bed and standing in corners and the like they have suffered becausetheir parents and guardians and teachers knew everything so much betterthan Socrates or Solon?

It is this ignorant uppishness that does the mischief. A stranger on theplanet might expect that its grotesque absurdity would provoke enoughridicule to cure it; but unfortunately quite the contrary happens. Just as our ill health delivers us into the hands of medical quacks andcreates a passionate demand for impudent pretences that doctors cancure the diseases they themselves die of daily, so our ignorance andhelplessness set us clamoring for spiritual and moral quacks who pretendthat they can save our souls from their own damnation. If a doctor wereto say to his patients, "I am familiar with your symptoms, because Ihave seen other people in your condition; and I will bring the verylittle knowledge we have to your treatment; but except in that veryshallow sense I dont know what is the matter with you; and I cantundertake to cure you, " he would be a lost man professionally; and if aclergyman, on being called on to award a prize for good conduct inthe village school, were to say, "I am afraid I cannot say who is thebest-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 hascaused least inconvenience, " he would probably be unfrocked, if notexcommunicated. And yet no honest and intellectually capable doctor orparson can say more. Clearly it would not be wise of the doctor to sayit, because optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that adoctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession. And a clergyman who is not prepared to lay down the law dogmaticallywill not be of much use in a village school, though it behoves him allthe more to be very careful what law he lays down. But unless both theclergyman and the doctor are in the attitude expressed by these speechesthey are not fit for their work. The man who believes that he has morethan a provisional hypothesis to go upon is a born fool. He may haveto act vigorously on it. The world has no use for the Agnostic who wontbelieve anything because anything might be false, and wont deny anythingbecause anything might be true. But there is a wide difference betweensaying, "I believe this; and I am going to act on it, " or, "I dontbelieve it; and I wont act on it, " and saying, "It is true; and it ismy duty and yours to act on it, " or, "It is false; and it is my dutyand yours to refuse to act on it. " The difference is as great as thatbetween the Apostles' Creed and the Athanasian Creed. When you repeatthe Apostles' Creed you affirm that you believe certain things. Thereyou are clearly within your rights. When you repeat the AthanasianCreed, you affirm that certain things are so, and that anybody whodoubts that they are so cannot be saved. And this is simply a piece ofimpudence on your part, as you know nothing about it except that as goodmen as you have never heard of your creed. The apostolic attitude isa desire to convert others to our beliefs for the sake of sympathy andlight: the Athanasian attitude is a desire to murder people who dontagree with us. I am sufficient of an Athanasian to advocate a lawfor the speedy execution of all Athanasians, because they violate thefundamental proposition of my creed, which is, I repeat, that allliving 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 isbeing 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 asubject for experiment. We are always experimenting with them. Wechallenge the experimental test for our system. We are continuallyguided by our experience in our great work of moulding the character ofour 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 theschoolmaster; and the Life Force for the child's purpose is in the childand not in the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster is another experiment;and a laboratory in which all the experiments began experimenting on oneanother would not produce intelligible results. I admit, however, thatif 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 mypolitical rights and theirs, they could not have watched the experimentvery long, because the first result would have been a rapid movementon my part in the direction of the door, and my disappearancethere-through. 

It may be worth inquiring where I should have gone to. I should say thatpractically every time I should have gone to a much more educationalplace. I should have gone into the country, or into the sea, or into theNational Gallery, or to hear a band if there was one, or to any librarywhere there were no schoolbooks. I should have read very dry anddifficult books: for example, though nothing would have induced meto read the budget of stupid party lies that served as a text-book ofhistory in school, I remember reading Robertson's Charles V. And hishistory of Scotland from end to end most laboriously. Once, stung by theairs of a schoolfellow who alleged that he had read Locke On The HumanUnderstanding, I attempted to read the Bible straight through, andactually got to the Pauline Epistles before I broke down in disgust atwhat seemed to me their inveterate crookedness of mind. If there hadbeen a school where children were really free, I should have had tobe driven out of it for the sake of my health by the teachers; for thechildren 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 thereal difficulty is to prevent them from wasting their time by readingfor the sake of reading and studying for the sake of studying, insteadof taking some trouble to find out what they really like and are capableof doing some good at. Some silly person will probably interrupt mehere with the remark that many children have no appetite for a literaryeducation at all, and would never open a book if they were not forcedto. I have known many such persons who have been forced to the pointof obtaining University degrees. And for all the effect their literaryexercises has left on them they might just as well have been put on thetreadmill. In fact they are actually less literate than the treadmillwould have left them; for they might by chance have picked up and dippedinto a volume of Shakespear or a translation of Homer if they had notbeen driven to loathe every famous name in literature. I should probablyknow as much Latin as French, if Latin had not been made the excuse formy school imprisonment and degradation. 

Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport

If we are to discuss the importance of art, learning, and intellectualculture, the first thing we have to recognize is that we have verylittle of them at present; and that this little has not been produced bycompulsory education: nay, that the scarcity is unnatural and has beenproduced by the violent exclusion of art and artists from schools. Onthe other hand we have quite a considerable degree of bodily culture:indeed there is a continual outcry against the sacrifice of mentalaccomplishments to athletics. In other words a sacrifice of theprofessed object of compulsory education to the real object of voluntaryeducation. It is assumed that this means that people prefer bodilyto mental culture; but may it not mean that they prefer liberty andsatisfaction to coercion and privation. Why is it that people who havebeen taught Shakespear as a school subject loathe his plays and cannotby any means be persuaded ever to open his works after they escape fromschool, whereas there is still, 300 years after his death, a wide andsteady sale for his works to people who read his plays as plays, and notas 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 theannotations and paraphrases forced on all young people by imprisonmentand flogging and scolding, there will not be a single man of letters orhigher mathematician the more in the country: on the contrary there willbe less, as so many potential lovers of literature and mathematics willhave been incurably prejudiced against them. Everyone who is conversantwith the class in which child imprisonment and compulsory schooling iscarried out to the final extremity of the university degree knows thatits scholastic culture is a sham; that it knows little about literatureor art and a great deal about point-to-point races; and that thevillage cobbler, who has never read a page of Plato, and is admittedlya dangerously ignorant man politically, is nevertheless a Socratescompared to the classically educated gentlemen who discuss politics incountry houses at election time (and at no other time) after their day'searnest and skilful shooting. Think of the years and years of wearytorment the women of the piano-possessing class have been forced tospend over the keyboard, fingering scales. How many of them could bebribed to attend a pianoforte recital by a great player, though theywill rise from sick beds rather than miss Ascot or Goodwood?

Another familiar fact that teaches the same lesson is that many womenwho have voluntarily attained a high degree of culture cannot addup their own housekeeping books, though their education in simplearithmetic was compulsory, whereas their higher education has beenwholly voluntary. Everywhere we find the same result. The imprisonment, the beating, the taming and laming, the breaking of young spirits, thearrest of development, the atrophy of all inhibitive power except thepower of fear, are real: the education is sham. Those who have beentaught most know least. 

Antichrist

Among the worst effects of the unnatural segregation of children inschools and the equally unnatural constant association of them withadults in the family is the utter defeat of the vital element inChristianity. Christ stands in the world for that intuition of thehighest humanity that we, being members one of another, must notcomplain, must not scold, must not strike, nor revile nor persecute norrevenge nor punish. Now family life and school life are, as far as themoral training of children is concerned, nothing but the deliberateinculcation of a routine of complaint, scolding, punishment, persecution, and revenge as the natural and only possible way of dealingwith evil or inconvenience. "Aint nobody to be whopped for this here?"exclaimed Sam Weller when he saw his employer's name written up on astage coach, and conceived the phenomenon as an insult which reflectedon himself. This exclamation of Sam Weller is at once the negation ofChristianity and the beginning and the end of current morality; and soit will remain as long as the family and the school persist as we knowthem: that is, as long as the rights of children are so utterly deniedthat nobody will even take the trouble to ascertain what they are, andcoming of age is like the turning of a convict into the street aftertwenty-one years penal servitude. Indeed it is worse; for the convictmay have learnt before his conviction how to live in freedom and mayremember how to set about it, however lamed his powers of freedom mayhave become through disuse; but the child knows no other way of life butthe slave's way. Born free, as Rousseau says, he has been laid hands onby slaves from the moment of his birth and brought up as a slave. How ishe, when he is at last set free, to be anything else than the slave heactually is, clamoring for war, for the lash, for police, prisons, andscaffolds in a wild panic of delusion that without these things heis lost. The grown-up Englishman is to the end of his days a badlybrought-up child, beyond belief quarrelsome, petulant, selfish, destructive, and cowardly: afraid that the Germans will come and enslavehim; that the burglar will come and rob him; that the bicycle or motorcar will run over him; that the smallpox will attack him; and that thedevil will run away with him and empty him out like a sack of coals on ablazing fire unless his nurse or his parents or his schoolmaster orhis bishop or his judge or his army or his navy will do something tofrighten these bad things away. And this Englishman, without the moralcourage of a louse, will risk his neck for fun fifty times every winterin the hunting field, and at Badajos sieges and the like will ram hishead into a hole bristling with sword blades rather than be beaten inthe one department in which he has been brought up to consult his ownhonor. As a Sportsman (and war is fundamentally the sport of huntingand fighting the most dangerous of the beasts of prey) he feels free. Hewill 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 hasnot 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 adultcompulsory military service, and finally of compulsory civil servicelasting until the age of superannuation. Always more schooling, morecompulsion. We are to be cured by an excess of the dose that haspoisoned 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 noblevirtues that have their root in pride. Now no schoolmaster will teachthese any more than a prison governor will teach his prisoners how tomutiny and escape. Self-preservation forces him to break the spiritthat revolts against him, and to inculcate submission, even to obsceneassault, as a duty. A bishop once had the hardihood to say that he wouldrather see England free than England sober. Nobody has yet dared to saythat he would rather see an England of ignoramuses than an England ofcowards and slaves. And if anyone did, it would be necessary to pointout that the antithesis is not a practical one, as we have got atpresent an England of ignoramuses who are also cowards and slaves, andextremely proud of it at that, because in school they are taught tosubmit, with what they ridiculously call Oriental fatalism (as if anyOriental has ever submitted more helplessly and sheepishly to robberyand oppression than we Occidentals do), to be driven day after day intocompounds and set to the tasks they loathe by the men they hate andfear, as if this were the inevitable destiny of mankind. And naturally, when they grow up, they helplessly exchange the prison of the school forthe prison of the mine or the workshop or the office, and drudge alongstupidly and miserably, with just enough gregarious instinct to turnfuriously on any intelligent person who proposes a change. It would bequite 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 pointedout over and over again. The difficulty is not the way but the will. Andwe have no will because the first thing done with us in childhood was tobreak our will. Can anything be more disgusting than the spectacle of anation reading the biography of Gladstone and gloating over the accountof how he was flogged at Eton, two of his schoolfellows being compelledto hold him down whilst he was flogged. Not long ago a public body inEngland had to deal with the case of a schoolmaster who, conceivinghimself insulted by the smoking of a cigaret against his orders bya pupil eighteen years old, proposed to flog him publicly as asatisfaction to what he called his honor and authority. I had intendedto give the particulars of this ease, but find the drudgery of repeatingsuch stuff too sickening, and the effect unjust to a man who wasdoing only what others all over the country were doing as part of theestablished routine of what is called education. The astounding part ofit was the manner in which the person to whom this outrage on decencyseemed quite proper and natural claimed to be a functionary of highcharacter, and had his claim allowed. In Japan he would hardly have beenallowed the privilege of committing suicide. What is to be said of aprofession in which such obscenities are made points of honor, or ofinstitutions 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 fromour childhood. When will we realize that the fact that we can becomeaccustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessaryfor us to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to?Before motor cars became common, necessity had accustomed us to afoulness in our streets which would have horrified us had the streetbeen our drawing-room carpet. Before long we shall be as particularabout our streets as we now are about our carpets; and their conditionin the nineteenth century will become as forgotten and incredible as thecondition of the corridors of palaces and the courts of castles was aslate as the eighteenth century. This foulness, we can plead, was imposedon us as a necessity by the use of horses and of huge retinues; butflogging has never been so imposed: it has always been a vice, cravedfor on any pretext by those depraved by it. Boys were flogged whencriminals were hanged, to impress the awful warning on them. Boys wereflogged at boundaries, to impress the boundaries on their memory. Othermethods and other punishments were always available: the choice ofthis one betrayed the sensual impulse which makes the practice anabomination. But when its viciousness made it customary, it waspractised and tolerated on all hands by people who were innocent ofanything worse than stupidity, ill temper, and inability to discoverother methods of maintaining order than those they had always seenpractised and approved of. From children and animals it extended toslaves and criminals. In the days of Moses it was limited to 39 lashes. In the early nineteenth century it had become an open madness: soldierswere sentenced to a thousand lashes for trifling offences, with theresult (among others less mentionable) that the Iron Duke of Wellingtoncomplained that it was impossible to get an order obeyed in the Britisharmy except in two or three crack regiments. Such frantic excesses ofthis disgusting neurosis provoked a reaction against it; but the clamorfor it by depraved persons never ceased, and was tolerated by a nationtrained to it from childhood in the schools until last year (1913), whenin what must be described as a paroxysm of sexual excitement provoked bythe agitation concerning the White Slave Traffic (the purely commercialnature of which I was prevented from exposing on the stage by theCensorship twenty years ago) the Government yielded to an outcry forflagellation led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and passed an Actunder which a judge can sentence a man to be flogged to the utmostextremity with any instrument usable for such a purpose that he caresto prescribe. Such an Act is not a legislative phenomenon but apsychopathic one. Its effect on the White Slave Traffic was, of course, to distract public attention from its real cause and from the people whoreally profit by it to imaginary "foreign scoundrels, " and to secure amonopoly of its organization for women. 

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

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

Technical Instruction

Technical instruction tempts to violence (as a short cut) morethan liberal education. The sailor in Mr Rudyard Kipling's CaptainsCourageous, teaching the boy the names of the ship's tackle with arope's end, does not disgust us as our schoolmasters do, especially asthe boy was a spoiled boy. But an unspoiled boy would not have neededthat drastic medicine. Technical training may be as tedious as learningto skate or to play the piano or violin; but it is the price one mustpay to achieve certain desirable results or necessary ends. It is amonstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematicson the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mentalpowers. It would be monstrous even if it were true; for there is nolabor that might not be imposed on a child or an adult on the samepretext; but as a glance at the average products of our public schooland university education shews that it is not true, it need not troubleus. But it is a fact that ignorance of Latin and Greek and mathematicscloses 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 whowant to learn them; and people will always want to learn them as long asthey are of any importance in life: indeed the want will survive theirimportance: superstition is nowhere stronger than in the field ofobsolete acquirements. And they will never be learnt fruitfully bypeople who do not want to learn them either for their own sake or foruse 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 ofevolution. 

Docility and Dependence

If anyone, impressed by my view that the rights of a child are preciselythose 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 somepoints than the usual plan, at others it will not work at all; and thisdiscovery may provoke him to turn back from the whole conception ofchildren's rights with a jest at the expense of bachelors' and oldmaids' children. In dealing with children what is needed is not logicbut sense. There is no logical reason why young persons should beallowed greater control of their property the day after they aretwenty-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 Latingrammar, and saying, "you must learn this, whether you want to or not, "should nevertheless be quite prepared to stand over a boy of five withthe multiplication table or a copy book or a code of elementary goodmanners, and practice on his docility to make him learn them. And thereis no logical reason why I should do for a child a great many littleoffices, some of them troublesome and disagreeable, which I shouldnot do for a boy twice its age, or support a boy or girl when I wouldunhesitatingly throw an adult on his own resources. But there arepractical reasons, and sensible reasons, and affectionate reasons forall these illogicalities. Children do not want to be treated altogetheras adults: such treatment terrifies them and over-burdens them withresponsibility. In truth, very few adults care to be called on forindependence and originality: they also are bewildered and terrifiedin the absence of precedents and precepts and commandments; but modernDemocracy allows them a sanctioning and cancelling power if they arecapable of using it, which children are not. To treat a child whollyas an adult would be to mock and destroy it. Infantile docility andjuvenile dependence are, like death, a product of Natural Selection;and though there is no viler crime than to abuse them, yet there is nogreater cruelty than to ignore them. I have complained sufficientlyof what I suffered through the process of assault, imprisonment, and compulsory lessons that taught me nothing, which are called myschooling. But I could say a good deal also about the things I was nottaught and should have been taught, not to mention the things I wasallowed to do which I should not have been allowed to do. I have norecollection of being taught to read or write; so I presume I was bornwith both faculties; but many people seem to have bitter recollectionsof being forced reluctantly to acquire them. And though I have theuttermost contempt for a teacher so ill mannered and incompetent as tobe unable to make a child learn to read and write without also making itcry, still I am prepared to admit that I had rather have been compelledto learn to read and write with tears by an incompetent and ill manneredperson than left in ignorance. Reading, writing, and enough arithmeticto use money honestly and accurately, together with the rudiments of lawand order, become necessary conditions of a child's liberty before itcan appreciate the importance of its liberty, or foresee that theseaccomplishments are worth acquiring. Nature has provided for this byevolving the instinct of docility. Children are very docile: they havea sound intuition that they must do what they are told or perish. Andadults have an intuition, equally sound, that they must take advantageof this docility to teach children how to live properly or the childrenwill not survive. The difficulty is to know where to stop. To illustratethis, let us consider the main danger of childish docility and parentalofficiousness. 

The Abuse of Docility

Docility may survive as a lazy habit long after it has ceased to be abeneficial instinct. If you catch a child when it is young enough to beinstinctively docile, and keep it in a condition of unremitted tutelageunder the nurserymaid, the governess, the preparatory school, thesecondary school, and the university, until it is an adult, you willproduce, not a self-reliant, free, fully matured human being, but agrown-up schoolboy or schoolgirl, capable of nothing in the way oforiginal or independent action except outbursts of naughtiness in thewomen and blackguardism in the men. That is exactly what we get atpresent in our rich and consequently governing classes: they pass fromjuvenility to senility without ever touching maturity except in body. The classes which cannot afford this sustained tutelage are notably moreself-reliant and grown-up: an office boy of fifteen is often more of aman than a university student of twenty. Unfortunately this precocityis disabled by poverty, ignorance, narrowness, and a hideous power ofliving without art or love or beauty and being rather proud of it. Thepoor never escape from servitude: their docility is preserved by theirslavery. And so all become the prey of the greedy, the selfish, thedomineering, the unscrupulous, the predatory. If here and there anindividual refuses to be docile, ten docile persons will beat him orlock him up or shoot him or hang him at the bidding of his oppressorsand 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 behealthily rebellious; but the king or prime minister has yet to be foundwho will make trouble by cultivating that side of the national spirit. Achild should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself moreand more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions andconduct; yet as nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppishchild, it is useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcatethis uppishness. Such unamiable precepts as Always contradict anauthoritative statement, Always return a blow, Never lose a chance of agood fight, When you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who scoldsyou whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose, and follow thequestion with a blow or an insult or some other unmistakable expressionof resentment, Remember that the progress of the world depends on yourknowing better than your elders, are just as important as those of TheSermon on the Mount; but no one has yet seen them written up in lettersof gold in a schoolroom or nursery. The child is taught to be kind, tobe respectful, to be quiet, not to answer back, to be truthful when itselders want to find out anything from it, to lie when the truth wouldshock or hurt its elders, to be above all things obedient, and to beseen and not heard. Here we have two sets of precepts, each warrantedto spoil a child hopelessly if the other be omitted. Unfortunately wedo not allow fair play between them. The rebellious, intractable, aggressive, selfish set provoke a corrective resistance, and do notpretend to high moral or religious sanctions; and they are never urgedby grown-up people on young people. They are therefore more in dangerof 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 besecured 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 athome become mollycoddles, or prigs, or duffers, unable to take care ofthemselves. They see that boys should learn to rough it a little andto mix with children of their own age. This is natural enough. When youhave preached at and punished a boy until he is a moral cripple, youare as much hampered by him as by a physical cripple; and as you do notintend to have him on your hands all your life, and are generally ratherimpatient for the day when he will earn his own living and leave you toattend to yourself, you sooner or later begin to talk to him about theneed for self-reliance, learning to think, and so forth, with the resultthat your victim, bewildered by your inconsistency, concludes that thereis no use trying to please you, and falls into an attitude of sulkyresentment. 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 beuntameable, always ready to fight, ruthless in taking the conceit out ofanyone 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 ofthe masters, the world of discipline, submission, diligence, obedience, and continual and shameless assumption of moral and intellectualauthority. Thus the schoolboy hears both sides, and is so far betteroff than the homebred boy who hears only one. But the two sides arenot fairly presented. They are presented as good and evil, as vice andvirtue, as villainy and heroism. The boy feels mean and cowardly whenhe obeys, and selfish and rascally when he disobeys. He looses his moralcourage just as he comes to hate books and languages. In the end, JohnRuskin, tied so close to his mother's apron-string that he did notescape even when he went to Oxford, and John Stuart Mill, whose fatherought to have been prosecuted for laying his son's childhood waste withlessons, were superior, as products of training, to our schoolboys. Theywere very conspicuously superior in moral courage; and though they didnot distinguish themselves at cricket and football, they had quite asmuch physical hardihood as any civilized man needs. But it is to beobserved that Ruskin's parents were wise people who gave John a fullshare in their own life, and put up with his presence both at home andabroad when they must sometimes have been very weary of him; and Mill, as it happens, was deliberately educated to challenge all the mostsacred institutions of his country. The households they were broughtup in were no more average households than a Montessori school is anaverage school. 

The Comings of Age of Children

All this inculcated adult docility, which wrecks every civilization asit is wrecking ours, is inhuman and unnatural. We must reconsider ourinstitution 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 forevery individual. The mammals have their first coming of age when theyare weaned; and it is noteworthy that this rather cruel and selfishoperation on the part of the parent has to be performed resolutely, withclaws and teeth; for your little mammal does not want to be weaned, andyields only to a pretty rough assertion of the right of the parent tobe relieved of the child as soon as the child is old enough to bear theseparation. The same thing occurs with children: they hang on to themother's apron-string and the father's coat tails as long as they can, often baffling those sensitive parents who know that children shouldthink for themselves and fend for themselves, but are too kind to throwthem on their own resources with the ferocity of the domestic cat. Thechild should have its first coming of age when it is weaned, anotherwhen it can talk, another when it can walk, another when it can dressitself without assistance; and when it can read, write, count money, andpass an examination in going a simple errand involving a purchase anda journey by rail or other public method of locomotion, it should havequite a majority. At present the children of laborers are soon mobileand able to shift for themselves, whereas it is possible to findgrown-up women in the rich classes who are actually afraid to take awalk in the streets unattended and unprotected. It is true that thisis a superstition from the time when a retinue was part of the stateof persons of quality, and the unattended person was supposed to be acommon person of no quality, earning a living; but this has now becomeso absurd that children and young women are no longer told why they areforbidden to go about alone, and have to be persuaded that the streetsare dangerous places, which of course they are; but people who are noteducated to live dangerously have only half a life, and are more likelyto die miserably after all than those who have taken all the commonrisks 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 bothschools and families are mostly very largely anarchic: parents andschoolmasters are good-natured or weak or lazy; and children are docileand affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits of naughtiness; andso most families slummock along and muddle through until the childrencease to be children. In the few cases when the parties are energeticand determined, the child is crushed or the parent is reduced to acipher, as the case may be. When the opposed forces are neither of themstrong enough to annihilate the other, there is serious trouble: thatis how we get those feuds between parent and child which recur to ourmemory so ironically when we hear people sentimentalizing about naturalaffection. We even get tragedies; for there is nothing so tragic tocontemplate or so devastating to suffer as the oppression of willwithout conscience; and the whole tendency of our family and schoolsystem is to set the will of the parent and the school despot aboveconscience as something that must be deferred to abjectly and absolutelyfor its own sake. 

The strongest, fiercest force in nature is human will. It is the highestorganization we know of the will that has created the whole universe. Now all honest civilization, religion, law, and convention is an attemptto keep this force within beneficent bounds. What corrupts civilization, religion, law, and convention (and they are at present pretty nearlyas corrupt as they dare) is the constant attempts made by the wills ofindividuals and classes to thwart the wills and enslave the powersof other individuals and classes. The powers of the parent and theschoolmaster, and of their public analogues the lawgiver and thejudge, become instruments of tyranny in the hands of those who are toonarrow-minded to understand law and exercise judgment; and in theirhands (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; andyour powers shall be at the disposal of my will. " It has come to this atlast: that the phrase "she has a will of her own, " or "he has a willof his own" has come to denote a person of exceptional obstinacy andself-assertion. And even persons of good natural disposition, ifbrought up to expect such deference, are roused to unreasoning fury, and sometimes to the commission of atrocious crimes, by the slightestchallenge to their authority. Thus a laborer may be dirty, drunken, untruthful, slothful, untrustworthy in every way without exhausting theindulgence of the country house. But let him dare to be "disrespectful"and he is a lost man, though he be the cleanest, soberest, mostdiligent, most veracious, most trustworthy man in the county. Dickens'sinstinct for detecting social cankers never served him better than whenhe shewed us Mrs Heep teaching her son to "be umble, " knowing that if hecarried out that precept he might be pretty well anything else he liked. The maintenance of deference to our wills becomes a mania which willcarry the best of us to any extremity. We will allow a village ofEgyptian fellaheen or Indian tribesmen to live the lowest life theyplease among themselves without molestation; but let one of them slayan Englishman or even strike him on the strongest provocation, andstraightway we go stark mad, burning and destroying, shooting andshelling, flogging and hanging, if only such survivors as we may leaveare thoroughly cowed in the presence of a man with a white face. Inthe committee room of a local council or city corporation, the humblestemployees of the committee find defenders if they complain of harshtreatment. Gratuities are voted, indulgences and holidays are pleadedfor, delinquencies are excused in the most sentimental manner providedonly the employee, however patent a hypocrite or incorrigible a slacker, is hat in hand. But let the most obvious measure of justice be demandedby the secretary of a Trade Union in terms which omit all expressionsof subservience, and it is with the greatest difficulty that thecooler-headed can defeat angry motions that the letter be thrown intothe 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 willwithout respect for the will of others. Democracy is in practice nothingbut a device for cajoling from him the vote he refuses to arbitraryauthority. He will not vote for Coriolanus; but when an experienceddemagogue comes along and says, "Sir: _you_ are the dictator: thevoice of the people is the voice of God; and I am only your very humbleservant, " he says at once, "All right: tell me what to dictate, " andis presently enslaved more effectually with his own silly consent thanCoriolanus would ever have enslaved him without asking his leave. Andthe trick by which the demagogue defeats Coriolanus is played on him inhis turn by _his_ inferiors. Everywhere we see the cunning succeedingin the world by seeking a rich or powerful master and practising on hislust for subservience. The political adventurer who gets into parliamentby offering himself to the poor voter, not as his representative but ashis will-less soulless "delegate, " is himself the dupe of a clever wifewho repudiates Votes for Women, knowing well that whilst the man ismaster, the man's mistress will rule. Uriah Heep may be a crawlingcreature; but his crawling takes him upstairs. 

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

Between parent and child the same conflict wages and the samedestruction of character ensues. Parents set themselves to bend the willof their children to their own--to break their stubborn spirit, asthey call it--with the ruthlessness of Grand Inquisitors. Cunning, unscrupulous children learn all the arts of the sneak in circumventingtyranny: children of better character are cruelly distressed and more orless lamed for life by it. 

Our Quarrelsomeness

As between adults, we find a general quarrelsomeness which makespolitical reform as impossible to most Englishmen as to hogs. Certainsections of the nation get cured of this disability. University men, sailors, and politicians are comparatively free from it, because thecommunal life of the University, the fact that in a ship a man musteither learn to consider others or else go overboard or into irons, andthe habit of working on committees and ceasing to expect more ofone's own way than is included in the greatest common measure of thecommittee, educate the will socially. But no one who has ever had toguide a committee of ordinary private Englishmen through their firstattempts at collective action, in committee or otherwise, can retainany illusions as to the appalling effects on our national mannersand character of the organization of the home and the school as pettytyrannies, and the absence of all teaching of self-respect and trainingin self-assertion. Bullied and ordered about, the Englishman obeys likea sheep, evades like a knave, or tries to murder his oppressor. Merelycriticized or opposed in committee, or invited to consider anybody'sviews but his own, he feels personally insulted and wants to resignor leave the room unless he is apologized to. And his panic andbewilderment when he sees that the older hands at the work have nopatience with him and do not intend to treat him as infallible, arepitiable as far as they are anything but ludicrous. That is what comesof not being taught to consider other people's wills, and left to submitto 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 democraticintroduction of high civilization, but with the comprehension andmaintenance of such civilized institutions as have been introduced bybenevolent 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 weare to give up the established plan, we find the difficulties so greatthat we begin to understand why so many people who detest the system andlook back with loathing on their own schooldays, must helplessly sendtheir children to the very schools they themselves were sent to, becausethere is no alternative except abandoning the children to undisciplinedvagabondism. Man in society must do as everybody else does in his class:only fools and romantic novices imagine that freedom is a mere matter ofthe readiness of the individual to snap his fingers at convention. Itis true that most of us live in a condition of quite unnecessaryinhibition, wearing ugly and uncomfortable clothes, making ourselves andother people miserable by the heathen horrors of mourning, staying awayfrom the theatre because we cannot afford the stalls and are ashamedto go to the pit, and in dozens of other ways enslaving ourselveswhen there are comfortable alternatives open to us without any realdrawbacks. The contemplation of these petty slaveries, and of thetriumphant ease with which sensible people throw them off, creates animpression that if we only take Johnson's advice to free our minds fromcant, we can achieve freedom. But if we all freed our minds from cantwe should find that for the most part we should have to go on doingthe necessary work of the world exactly as we did it before until weorganized new and free methods of doing it. Many people believed insecondary co-education (boys and girls taught together) before schoolslike Bedales were founded: indeed the practice was common enough inelementary schools and in Scotland; but their belief did not help themuntil Bedales and St George's were organized; and there are still notnearly enough co-educational schools in existence to accommodate allthe children of the parents who believe in co-education up to universityage, even if they could always afford the fees of these exceptionalschools. It may be edifying to tell a duke that our public schools areall wrong in their constitution and methods, or a costermonger thatchildren should be treated as in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister instead of asthey 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 anyeffective choice in the matter: their children must either go to theschools that are, or to no school at all. And as the duke thinks withreason that his son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he doesnot go to school, and the coster knows that his son will become anilliterate hooligan if he is left to the streets, there is no realalternative for either of them. Child life must be socially organized:no parent, rich or poor, can choose institutions that do not exist; andthe private enterprise of individual school masters appealing to agroup of well-to-do parents, though it may shew what can be done byenthusiasts with new methods, cannot touch the mass of our children. For the average parent or child nothing is really available except theestablished practice; and this is what makes it so important that theestablished practice should be a sound one, and so useless for cleverindividuals to disparage it unless they can organize an alternativepractice and make it, too, general. 

The Pursuit of Manners

If you cross-examine the duke and the coster, you will find that theyare not concerned for the scholastic attainments of their children. Ask the duke whether he could pass the standard examination oftwelve-year-old children in elementary schools, and he will admit, with an entirely placid smile, that he would almost certainly beignominiously plucked. And he is so little ashamed of or disadvantagedby his condition that he is not prepared to spend an hour in remedyingit. 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 theirchildren is the communal training, the apprenticeship to society, thelessons in holding one's own among people of all sorts with whom one isnot, 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 parentcares twopence whether his children can write Latin hexameters orrepeat the dates of the accession of all the English monarchs since theConqueror; but all parents are earnestly anxious about the manners oftheir children. Better Claude Duval than Kaspar Hauser. Laborers who arecontemptuously anti-clerical in their opinions will send theirdaughters to the convent school because the nuns teach them some sortof gentleness of speech and behavior. And peers who tell you that ourpublic schools are rotten through and through, and that our Universitiesought to be razed to the foundations, send their sons to Eton andOxford, Harrow and Cambridge, not only because there is nothing else tobe done, but because these places, though they turn out blackguardsand ignoramuses and boobies galore, turn them out with the habits andmanners of the society they belong to. Bad as those manners are in manyrespects, they are better than no manners at all. And no individual orfamily can possibly teach them. They can be acquired only by living inan organized community in which they are traditional. 

Thus we see that there are reasons for the segregation of children evenin families where the great reason: namely, that children are nuisancesto adults, does not press very hardly, as, for instance, in the housesof 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'squarters 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 exceptpropagating the conception of Children's Rights. Only the achievementof economic equality through Socialism can make it possible to dealthoroughly with the question from the point of view of the totalinterest of the community, which must always consist of grown-upchildren. Yet economic equality, like all simple and obviousarrangements, seems impossible to people brought up as children are now. Still, something can be done even within class limits. Large communitiesof children of the same class are possible today; and voluntaryorganization of outdoor life for children has already begun in BoyScouting and excursions of one kind or another. The discovery thatanything, even school life, is better for the child than home life, will become an over-ridden hobby; and we shall presently be told by ourfaddists that anything, even camp life, is better than school life. Some blundering beginnings of this are already perceptible. There is amovement for making our British children into priggish little barefootedvagabonds, all talking like that born fool George Borrow, and supposedto be splendidly healthy because they would die if they slept in roomswith the windows shut, or perhaps even with a roof over their heads. Still, this is a fairly healthy folly; and it may do something toestablish Mr Harold Cox's claim of a Right to Roam as the basis of amuch needed law compelling proprietors of land to provide plenty ofgates in their fences, and to leave them unlocked when there are nogrowing crops to be damaged nor bulls to be encountered, instead of, asat present, imprisoning the human race in dusty or muddy thoroughfaresbetween 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 cockneybook fanciers blowing themselves out with "the wind on the heath, brother, " and of anarchists who are either too weak to understand thatmen are strong and free in proportion to the social pressure theycan stand and the complexity of the obligations they are prepared toundertake, or too strong to realize that what is freedom to them may beterror and bewilderment to others, will drive them back to the home andthe school if these have meanwhile learned the lesson that children areindependent human beings and have rights. 

Wanted: a Child's Magna Charta

Whether we shall presently be discussing a Juvenile Magna Charta orDeclaration of Rights by way of including children in the Constitutionis a question on which I leave others to speculate. But if it couldonce be established that a child has an adult's Right of Egress fromuncomfortable places and unpleasant company, and there were children'slawyers to sue pedagogues and others for assault and imprisonment, therewould be an amazing change in the behavior of schoolmasters, the qualityof school books, and the amenities of school life. That Consciousness ofConsent which, even in its present delusive form, has enabled Democracyto oust tyrannical systems in spite of all its vulgarities andstupidities and rancors and ineptitudes and ignorances, would operate aspowerfully among children as it does now among grown-ups. No doubt thepedagogue would promptly turn demagogue, and woo his scholars by all thearts of demagogy; but none of these arts can easily be so dishonorableor mischievous as the art of caning. And, after all, if larger libertiesare attached to the acquisition of knowledge, and the child findsthat it can no more go to the seaside without a knowledge of themultiplication and pence tables than it can be an astronomer withoutmathematics, it will learn the multiplication table, which is more thanit 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 bythe child instead of the pursuit of the child by Learning, cane inhand, the danger will be precocity of the intellect, which is just asundesirable as precocity of the emotions. We still have a silly habit oftalking and thinking as if intellect were a mechanical process and not apassion; and in spite of the German tutors who confess openly that threeout of every five of the young men they coach for examinations are lamedfor life thereby; in spite of Dickens and his picture of little PaulDombey dying of lessons, we persist in heaping on growing children andadolescent youths and maidens tasks Pythagoras would have declined outof common regard for his own health and common modesty as to his owncapacity. And this overwork is not all the effect of compulsion; forthe average schoolmaster does not compel his scholars to learn: he onlyscolds and punishes them if they do not, which is quite a differentthing, the net effect being that the school prisoners need not learnunless they like. Nay, it is sometimes remarked that the schooldunce--meaning the one who does not like--often turns out wellafterwards, as if idleness were a sign of ability and character. A muchmore sensible explanation is that the so-called dunces are not exhaustedbefore they begin the serious business of life. It is said that boyswill be boys; and one can only add one wishes they would. Boys reallywant to be manly, and are unfortunately encouraged thoughtlessly in thisvery dangerous and overstraining aspiration. All the people who havereally worked (Herbert Spencer for instance) warn us against work asearnestly as some people warn us against drink. When learning is placedon the voluntary footing of sport, the teacher will find himself sayingevery day "Run away and play: you have worked as much as is good foryou. " Trying to make children leave school will be like trying to makethem go to bed; and it will be necessary to surprise them with the ideathat teaching is work, and that the teacher is tired and must go play orrest or eat: possibilities always concealed by that infamous humbugthe current schoolmaster, who achieves a spurious divinity and a witchdoctor's authority by persuading children that he is not human, just asladies persuade them that they have no legs. 

Children and Game: a Proposal

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

This much hope, however, can be extracted from the present state ofthings. It is so fantastic, so mad, so apparently impossible, that noscheme of reform need ever henceforth be discredited on the ground thatit is fantastic or mad or apparently impossible. It is the sensibleschemes, unfortunately, that are hopeless in England. Therefore I havegreat hopes that my own views, though fundamentally sensible, can bemade to appear fantastic enough to have a chance. 

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

The Parents' Intolerable Burden

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

This is so far recognized that already the child finds, wherever itgoes, a school for it, and somebody to force it into the school; andmore and more these schools are being driven by the mere logic of factsto provide the children with meals, with boots, with spectacles, withdentists and doctors. In fact, when the child's parents are destitute ornot to be found, bread, lodging, and clothing are provided. It is truethat they are provided grudgingly and on conditions infamous enough todraw down abundant fire from Heaven upon us every day in the shape ofcrime and disease and vice; but still the practice of keeping childrenbarely alive at the charge of the community is established; and there isno need for me to argue about it. I propose only two extensions of thepractice. 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 thatyou are socially a fool and personally an inhuman wretch. The other isthat these wants should be supplied in complete freedom from compulsoryschooling or compulsory anything except restraint from crime, though, as they can be supplied only by social organization, the child must beconscious of and subject to the conditions of that organization, whichmay involve such portions of adult responsibility and duty as a childmay be able to bear according to its age, and which will in any caseprevent it from forming the vagabond and anarchist habit of mind. 

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

Mobilization

Those who see no prospect held out to them by this except a country inwhich all the children shall be roaming savages, should consider, first, whether their condition would be any worse than that of the little cagedsavages of today, and second, whether either children or adults areso apt to run wild that it is necessary to tether them fast to oneneighborhood to prevent a general dissolution of society. My ownobservation 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 stillfind in the home counties old men who have never been to London, and whotell you that they once went to Winchester or St Albans much as if theyhad been to the South Pole; but they are not so common as the clerk whohas 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 hehad, would no more have dreamed of crossing the Channel than of takinga box at the Opera. But with all allowance for the Polytechnic excursionand the tourist agency, our inertia is still appalling. I confess tohaving once spent nine years in London without putting my noseoutside it; and though this was better, perhaps, than the restlessglobe-trotting vagabondage of the idle rich, wandering from hotel tohotel and never really living anywhere, yet I should no more have doneit if I had been properly mobilized in my childhood than I should haveworn the same suit of clothes all that time (which, by the way, I verynearly 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 moreimmovable than Aldgate pump. To others, who would move if they knew how, travelling is surrounded with imaginary difficulties and terrors. Inshort, the difficulty is not to fix people, but to root them up. We keeprepeating the silly proverb that a rolling stone gathers no moss, as ifmoss were a desirable parasite. What we mean is that a vagabond does notprosper. Even this is not true, if prosperity means enjoyment as well asresponsibility and money. The real misery of vagabondage is the miseryof having nothing to do and nowhere to go, the misery of being derelictof God and Man, the misery of the idle, poor or rich. And this is oneof the miseries of unoccupied childhood. The unoccupied adult, thusafflicted, tries many distractions which are, to say the least, unsuitedto children. But one of them, the distraction of seeing the world, isinnocent and beneficial. Also it is childish, being a continuation ofwhat nurses call "taking notice, " by which a child becomes experienced. It is pitiable nowadays to see men and women doing after the age of 45all the travelling and sightseeing they should have done before theywere 15. Mere wondering and staring at things is an important part ofa child's education: that is why children can be thoroughly mobilizedwithout making vagabonds of them. A vagabond is at home nowhere becausehe wanders: a child should wander because it ought to be at homeeverywhere. And if it has its papers and its passports, and gets whatit requires not by begging and pilfering, but from responsible agentsof the community as of right, and with some formal acknowledgment ofthe obligations it is incurring and a knowledge of the fact that theseobligations are being recorded: if, further, certain qualifications areexacted before it is promoted from permission to go as far as itslegs will carry it to using mechanical aids to locomotion, it can roamwithout much danger of gypsification. 

Under such circumstances the boy or girl could always run away, andnever be lost; and on no other conditions can a child be free withoutbeing also a homeless outcast. 

Parents could also run away from disagreeable children or drive them outof 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; fornobody now alive can imagine what customs and institutions would growup in societies of free children. Child laws and child fashions, childmanners and child morals are now not tolerated; but among free childrenthere would certainly be surprising developments in this direction. I donot think there would be any danger of free children behaving as badlyas grown-up people do now because they have never been free. They couldhardly behave worse, anyhow. 

Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs

A very distinguished man once assured a mother of my acquaintance thatshe would never know what it meant to be hurt until she was hurt throughher children. Children are extremely cruel without intending it; andin ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they do notconceive their elders as having any human feelings. Serve the eldersright, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of the impostoris not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but that he is takenfor what he pretends to be, and treated as such. And to be treated asanything but what you really are may seem pleasant to the imaginationwhen the treatment is above your merits; but in actual experience itis often quite the reverse. When I was a very small boy, my romanticimagination, stimulated by early doses of fiction, led me to brag to astill smaller boy so outrageously that he, being a simple soul, reallybelieved me to be an invincible hero. I cannot remember whether thispleased me much; but I do remember very distinctly that one day thisadmirer of mine, who had a pet goat, found the animal in the hands of alarger boy than either of us, who mocked him and refused to restore theanimal to his rightful owner. Whereupon, naturally, he came weepingto me, and demanded that I should rescue the goat and annihilate theaggressor. My terror was beyond description: fortunately for me, itimparted such a ghastliness to my voice and aspect as I under the eye ofmy poor little dupe, advanced on the enemy with that hideous extremityof cowardice which is called the courage of despair, and said "You letgo that goat, " that he abandoned his prey and fled, to my unforgettable, unspeakable relief. I have never since exaggerated my prowess in bodilycombat. 

Now what happened to me in the adventure of the goat happens very oftento parents, and would happen to schoolmasters if the prison door of theschool 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 illnessof his wife. In the confusion that ensued it became necessary toleave one of the schoolrooms without a master. I was in the class thatoccupied that schoolroom. To have sent us home would have been to breakthe fundamental bargain with our parents by which the school was boundto keep us out of their way for half the day at all hazards. Thereforean appeal had to be made to our better feelings: that is, to our commonhumanity, not to make a noise. But the head master had never admittedany common humanity with us. We had been carefully broken in to regardhim as a being quite aloof from and above us: one not subject to erroror suffering or death or illness or mortality. Consequently sympathy wasimpossible; and if the unfortunate lady did not perish, it was because, as I now comfort myself with guessing, she was too much pre-occupiedwith her own pains, and possibly making too much noise herself, to beconscious of the pandemonium downstairs. 

A great deal of the fiendishness of schoolboys and the cruelty ofchildren to their elders is produced just in this way. Elders cannot besuperhuman beings and suffering fellow-creatures at the same time. Ifyou 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 parenteven when money is no object, and the material worries are delegated toservants and school teachers. The child and the parent are strangersto one another necessarily, because their ages must differ widely. ReadGoethe's autobiography; and note that though he was happy in hisparents and had exceptional powers of observation, divination, andstory-telling, he knew less about his father and mother than about mostof the other people he mentions. I myself was never on bad terms withmy mother: we lived together until I was forty-two years old, absolutelywithout the smallest friction of any kind; yet when her death set methinking curiously about our relations, I realized that I knew verylittle about her. Introduce me to a strange woman who was a child whenI was a child, a girl when I was a boy, an adolescent when I was anadolescent; and if we take naturally to one another I will know more ofher and she of me at the end of forty days (I had almost said offorty minutes) than I knew of my mother at the end of forty years. Acontemporary stranger is a novelty and an enigma, also a possibility;but a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, itdoes 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 isbeaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a factin nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, andweaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning. IfI meet a widow I may ask her all about her marriage; but what son everdreams of asking his mother about her marriage, or could endure to hearof it without violently breaking off the old sacred relationship betweenthem, and ceasing to be her child or anything more to her than the firstman in the street might be?

Yet though in this sense the child cannot realize its parent'shumanity, the parent can realize the child's; for the parents with theirexperience of life have none of the illusions about the child that thechild has about the parents; and the consequence is that the childcan hurt its parents' feelings much more than its parents can hurtthe child's, because the child, even when there has been none of thedeliberate hypocrisy by which children are taken advantage of by theirelders, cannot conceive the parent as a fellow-creature, whilst theparents know very well that the children are only themselves over again. The child cannot conceive that its blame or contempt or want of interestcould possibly hurt its parent, and therefore expresses them all withan indifference which has given rise to the term _enfant terrible_ (atragic term in spite of the jests connected with it); whilst the parentcan suffer from such slights and reproaches more from a child than fromanyone else, even when the child is not beloved, because the child is sounmistakably sincere in them. 

Our Abandoned Mothers

Take a very common instance of this agonizing incompatibility. A widowbrings up her son to manhood. He meets a strange woman, and goes offwith and marries her, leaving his mother desolate. It does not occur tohim 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 specialaffection, the woman for whom she has been abandoned. If he shewed anysense of what he was doing, any remorse; if he mingled his tears withhers and asked her not to think too hardly of him because he had obeyedthe inevitable destiny of a man to leave his father and mother andcleave to his wife, she could give him her blessing and accept herbereavement with dignity and without reproach. But the man never dreamsof such considerations. To him his mother's feeling in the matter, whenshe betrays it, is unreasonable, ridiculous, and even odious, as shewinga prejudice against his adorable bride. 

I have taken the widow as an extreme and obvious case; but there aremany husbands and wives who are tired of their consorts, or disappointedin them, or estranged from them by infidelities; and these parents, inlosing a son or a daughter through marriage, may be losing everythingthey 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 excludethe bitterness, jealousy, and despair at loss which characterize sexualpassion: in fact, what is called a pure love may easily be more selfishand jealous than a carnal one. Anyhow, it is plain matter of fact thatnaively selfish people sometimes try with fierce jealousy to preventtheir children marrying. 

Family Affection

Until the family as we know it ceases to exist, nobody will dare toanalyze parental affection as distinguished from that general humansympathy which has secured to many an orphan fonder care in a stranger'shouse than it would have received from its actual parents. Not evenTolstoy, 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 tothe child's welfare, it is apt to be morbid; and we are probably wrongto inculcate its deliberate cultivation. The natural course is forthe parents and children to cast off the specific parental and filialrelation when they are no longer necessary to one another. Thechild does this readily enough to form fresh ties, closer and morefascinating. Parents are not always excluded from such compensations:it happens sometimes that when the children go out at the door the lovercomes in at the window. Indeed it happens now oftener than it used to, because people remain much longer in the sexual arena. The cultivatedJewess no longer cuts off her hair at her marriage. The British matronhas discarded her cap and her conscientious ugliness; and a bishop'swife at fifty has more of the air of a _femme galante_ than an actresshad at thirty-five in her grandmother's time. But as people marry later, the facts of age and time still inexorably condemn most parents tocomparative solitude when their children marry. This may be a privationand may be a relief: probably in healthy circumstances it is no worsethan a salutary change of habit; but even at that it is, for the momentat least, a wrench. For though parents and children sometimes dislikeone another, there is an experience of succor and a habit of dependenceand expectation formed in infancy which naturally attaches a child toits 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 becomeattached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attachedto them; and to "suffer little children" has become an affectionateimpulse 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 ourrelatives, we might, by selecting congenial ones, mitigate the repulsiveeffect 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 hehappens to have the same parents is unbearable when, as may easilyhappen, he is the sort of person we should carefully avoid if he wereanyone else's brother. All Europe (except Scotland, which has clansinstead of families) draws the line at second cousins. Protestantismdraws it still closer by making the first cousin a marriageablestranger; and the only reason for not drawing it at sisters and brothersis that the institution of the family compels us to spend ourchildhood with them, and thus imposes on us a curious relation in whichfamiliarity destroys romantic charm, and is yet expected to create aspecially warm affection. Such a relation is dangerously factitious andunnatural; and the practical moral is that the less said at home aboutspecific family affection the better. Children, like grown-up people, get on well enough together if they are not pushed down one another'sthroats; and grown-up relatives will get on together in proportionto their separation and their care not to presume on their bloodrelationship. We should let children's feelings take their naturalcourse without prompting. I have seen a child scolded and calledunfeeling because it did not occur to it to make a theatricaldemonstration of affectionate delight when its mother returned after anabsence: a typical example of the way in which spurious family sentimentis stoked up. We are, after all, sociable animals; and if we are letalone in the matter of our affections, and well brought up otherwise, we shall not get on any the worse with particular people because theyhappen to be our brothers and sisters and cousins. The danger lies inassuming that we shall get on any better. 

The main point to grasp here is that families are not kept together atpresent by family feeling but by human feeling. The family cultivatessympathy and mutual help and consolation as any other form of kindlyassociation cultivates them; but the addition of a dictated compulsoryaffection as an attribute of near kinship is not only unnecessary, but positively detrimental; and the alleged tendency of modern socialdevelopment to break up the family need alarm nobody. We cannot break upthe facts of kinship nor eradicate its natural emotional consequences. What we can do and ought to do is to set people free to behave naturallyand to change their behavior as circumstances change. To impose ona citizen of London the family duties of a Highland cateran in theeighteenth century is as absurd as to compel him to carry a claymore andtarget instead of an umbrella. The civilized man has no special usefor cousins; and he may presently find that he has no special use forbrothers and sisters. The parent seems likely to remain indispensable;but there is no reason why that natural tie should be made the excusefor unnatural aggravations of it, as crushing to the parent as they areoppressive to the child. The mother and father will not always haveto shoulder the burthen of maintenance which should fall on the Atlasshoulders of the fatherland and motherland. Pending such reforms andemancipations, a shattering break-up of the parental home must remainone of the normal incidents of marriage. The parent is left lonely andthe 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 iswell to be a mother but not to be a mother-in-law; and if men were cutoff artificially from intellectual and public interests as women are, the father-in-law would be as deplorable a figure in popular traditionas the mother-in-law. 

It is not to be wondered at that some people hold that bloodrelationship should be kept a secret from the persons related, and thatthe happiest condition in this respect is that of the foundling who, ifhe ever meets his parents or brothers or sisters, passes them by withoutknowing them. And for such a view there is this to be said: that ourfamily system does unquestionably take the natural bond between membersof the same family, which, like all natural bonds, is not too tight tobe borne, and superimposes on it a painful burden of forced, inculcated, suggested, and altogether unnecessary affection and responsibility whichwe should do well to get rid of by making relatives as independent ofone another as possible. 

The Fate of the Family

The difficulty of inducing people to talk sensibly about the family isthe same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume asconfusing discussions of marriage. Marriage is not a single invariableinstitution: it changes from civilization to civilization, from religionto religion, from civil code to civil code, from frontier to frontier. The family is still more variable, because the number of personsconstituting a family, unlike the number of persons constituting amarriage, varies from one to twenty: indeed, when a widower with afamily marries a widow with a family, and the two produce a thirdfamily, even that very high number may be surpassed. And the conditionsmay vary between opposite extremes: for example, in a London or Parisslum every child adds to the burden of poverty and helps to starve theparents and all the other children, whereas in a settlement of pioneercolonists every child, from the moment it is big enough to lend a handto the family industry, is an investment in which the only danger isthat of temporary over-capitalization. Then there are the variationsin family sentiment. Sometimes the family organization is as franklypolitical as the organization of an army or an industry: fathers beingno more expected to be sentimental about their children than colonelsabout soldiers, or factory owners about their employees, though themother may be allowed a little tenderness if her character is weak. TheRoman father was a despot: the Chinese father is an object of worship:the sentimental modern western father is often a play-fellow looked tofor toys and pocket-money. The farmer sees his children constantly: thesquire sees them only during the holidays, and not then oftener than hecan 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, TheFamily, The Domestic Hearth, and so on, are no more specific than TheMammals, or The Man In The Street; and the pious generalizations foundedso glibly on them by our sentimental moralists are unworkable. When households average twelve persons with the sexes about equallyrepresented, the results may be fairly good. When they average three theresults may be very bad indeed; and to lump the two together underthe general term The Family is to confuse the question hopelessly. Themodern small family is much too stuffy: children "brought up at home"in it are unfit for society. But here again circumstances differ. If theparents live in what is called a garden suburb, where there is a gooddeal of social intercourse, and the family, instead of keeping itself toitself, as the evil old saying is, and glowering at the neighbors overthe blinds of the long street in which nobody knows his neighbor andeveryone 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 byfrank neighborly intercourse through dances and concerts and theatricalsand excursions and the like, families of four may turn out much lessbarbarous citizens than families of ten which attain the Boer ideal ofbeing out of sight of one another's chimney smoke. 

All one can say is, roughly, that the homelier the home, and the morefamiliar the family, the worse for everybody concerned. The family idealis a humbug and a nuisance: one might as reasonably talk of the barrackideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any other substitution of themachinery of social organization for the end of it, which must alwaysbe the fullest and most capable life: in short, the most godly life. Andthis significant word reminds us that though the popular conception ofheaven includes a Holy Family, it does not attach to that familythe notion of a separate home, or a private nursery or kitchen ormother-in-law, or anything that constitutes the family as we know it. Even blood relationship is miraculously abstracted from it; and theFather is the father of all children, the mother the mother of allmothers and babies, and the Son the Son of Man and the Savior of hisbrothers: one whose chief utterance on the subject of the conventionalfamily was an invitation to all of us to leave our families and followhim, and to leave the dead to bury the dead, and not debauch ourselvesat that gloomy festival the family funeral, with its sequel of hideousmourning and grief which is either affected or morbid. 

Family Mourning

I do not know how far this detestable custom of mourning is carried inFrance; but judging from the appearance of the French people I shouldsay that a Frenchwoman goes into mourning for her cousins to theseventeenth degree. The result is that when I cross the Channel I seemto have reached a country devastated by war or pestilence. It is reallysuffering only from the family. Will anyone pretend that England hasnot the best of this striking difference? Yet it is such senseless andunnatural conventions as this that make us so impatient of what we callfamily feeling. Even apart from its insufferable pretensions, the familyneeds hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable part of itthat could not be amputated with advantage. 

Art Teaching

By art teaching I hasten to say that I do not mean giving childrenlessons in freehand drawing and perspective. I am simply callingattention 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 workof art. Similarly, you cannot listen to a lesson or a sermon unless theteacher or the preacher is an artist. You cannot read the Bible if youhave no sense of literary art. The reason why the continental Europeanis, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of theBible, is that the authorized English version is a great work ofliterary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless. To read a dull book; to listen to a tedious play or prosy sermon orlecture; to stare at uninteresting pictures or ugly buildings: nothing, short of disease, is more dreadful than this. The violence done to oursouls by it leaves injuries and produces subtle maladies which havenever been properly studied by psycho-pathologists. Yet we are so inuredto it in school, where practically all the teachers are bores tryingto do the work of artists, and all the books artless, that we acquirea truly frightful power of enduring boredom. We even acquire the notionthat fine art is lascivious and destructive to the character. In church, in the House of Commons, at public meetings, we sit solemnly listeningto bores and twaddlers because from the time we could walk or speak wehave been snubbed, scolded, bullied, beaten and imprisoned whenever wedared to resent being bored or twaddled at, or to express our naturalimpatience and derision of bores and twaddlers. And when a man ariseswith a soul of sufficient native strength to break the bonds of thisinculcated reverence and to expose and deride and tweak the noses of ourhumbugs and panjandrums, like Voltaire or Dickens, we are shocked andscandalized, even when we cannot help laughing. Worse, we dread andpersecute those who can see and declare the truth, because theirsincerity and insight reflects on our delusion and blindness. We areall like Nell Gwynne's footman, who defended Nell's reputation with hisfists, 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 nobetter than she should be. 

This wretched power of allowing ourselves to be bored may seem to givethe fine arts a chance sometimes. People will sit through a performanceof Beethoven's ninth symphony or of Wagner's Ring just as they will sitthrough a dull sermon or a front bench politician saying nothing for twohours whilst his unfortunate country is perishing through the delayof its business in Parliament. But their endurance is very bad for theninth symphony, because they never hiss when it is murdered. I haveheard an Italian conductor (no longer living) take the _adagio_ of thatsymphony at a lively _allegretto_, slowing down for the warmer majorsections into the speed and manner of the heroine's death song in aVerdi opera; and the listeners, far from relieving my excruciation byrising with yells of fury and hurling their programs and opera glassesat the miscreant, behaved just as they do when Richter conducts it. Themass of imposture that thrives on this combination of ignorance withdespairing endurance is incalculable. Given a public trained fromchildhood to stand anything tedious, and so saturated with schooldiscipline that even with the doors open and no schoolmasters to stopthem they will sit there helplessly until the end of the concert oropera gives them leave to go home; and you will have in great capitalshundreds of thousands of pounds spent every night in the season onprofessedly artistic entertainments which have no other effect on fineart than to exacerbate the hatred in which it is already secretly heldin England. 

Fortunately, there are arts that cannot be cut off from the people bybad performances. We can read books for ourselves; and we can playa good deal of fine music for ourselves with the help of a pianola. Nothing stands between us and the actual handwork of the great mastersof painting except distance; and modern photographic methods ofreproduction are in some cases quite and in many nearly as effective inconveying the artist's message as a modern edition of Shakespear's playsis in conveying the message that first existed in his handwriting. Thereproduction of great feats of musical execution is already on theway: the phonograph, for all its wheezing and snarling and braying, issteadily improving in its manners; and what with this improvement on theone hand, and on the other that blessed selective faculty which enablesus to ignore a good deal of disagreeable noise if there is a threadof music in the middle of it (few critics of the phonograph seem to beconscious of the very considerable mechanical noise set up by choirsand 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 onlymusic, and that music is made by a few well-intentioned ladies withthe help of a harmonium, can hear masses by Palestrina very passablyexecuted, and can thereby be led to the discovery that Jackson in F andHymns Ancient and Modern are not perhaps the last word of beauty andpropriety 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 ofbody and soul, and which alone can make the history of the past live forus or the hope of the future shine for us, which alone can give delicacyand nobility to our crude lusts, which is the appointed vehicle ofinspiration and the method of the communion of saints, is actuallybranded as sinful among us because, wherever it arises, there isresistance to tyranny, breaking of fetters, and the breath of freedom. The attempt to suppress art is not wholly successful: we might as welltry to suppress oxygen. But it is carried far enough to inflict on hugenumbers of people a most injurious art starvation, and to corrupt agreat deal of the art that is tolerated. You will find in England plentyof rich families with little more culture than their dogs and horses. And you will find poor families, cut off by poverty and town lifefrom the contemplation of the beauty of the earth, with its dresses ofleaves, its scarves of cloud, and its contours of hill and valley, whowould positively be happier as hogs, so little have they cultivatedtheir humanity by the only effective instrument of culture: art. Thedearth is artificially maintained even when there are the means ofsatisfying it. Story books are forbidden, picture post cards areforbidden, theatres are forbidden, operas are forbidden, circuses areforbidden, sweetmeats are forbidden, pretty colors are forbidden, allexactly as vice is forbidden. The Creator is explicitly prayed to, andimplicitly convicted of indecency every day. An association of vice andsin with everything that is delightful and of goodness with everythingthat is wretched and detestable is set up. All the most perilous (andglorious) appetites and propensities are at once inflamed by starvationand uneducated by art. All the wholesome conditions which art imposes onappetite are waived: instead of cultivated men and women restrained bya thousand delicacies, repelled by ugliness, chilled by vulgarity, horrified by coarseness, deeply and sweetly moved by the graces that arthas revealed to them and nursed in them, we get indiscriminate rapacityin pursuit of pleasure and a parade of the grossest stimulations incatering for it. We have a continual clamor for goodness, beauty, virtue, and sanctity, with such an appalling inability to recognizeit or love it when it arrives that it is more dangerous to be a greatprophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simplefolk out of their savings. Do not for a moment suppose that uncultivatedpeople are merely indifferent to high and noble qualities. They hatethem malignantly. At best, such qualities are like rare and beautifulbirds: when they appear the whole country takes down its guns; but thebirds receive the statuary tribute of having their corpses stuffed. 

And it really all comes from the habit of preventing children frombeing troublesome. You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing howtroublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Miloonly 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 notsuited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallinglyunlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parentalprotection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a singledanger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken downall the defences which so effectively protect children brought up infreedom. You have men who imagine themselves to be ministers of religionopenly declaring that when they pass through the streets they haveto keep out in the wheeled traffic to avoid the temptations of thepavement. You have them organizing hunts of the women who temptthem--poor creatures whom no artist would touch without a shudder--andwildly clamoring for more clothes to disguise and conceal the body, andfor 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 fortoleration. To them an undraped human body is the most monstrous, themost blighting, the most obscene, the most unbearable spectacle in theuniverse. To an artist it is, at its best, the most admirable spectaclein nature, and, at its average, an object of indifference. If every ragof clothing miraculously dropped from the inhabitants of London at noontomorrow (say as a preliminary to the Great Judgment), the artisticpeople would not turn a hair; but the artless people would go mad andcall on the mountains to hide them. I submit that this indicates athoroughly healthy state on the part of the artists, and a thoroughlymorbid one on the part of the artless. And the healthy state isattainable in a cold country like ours only by familiarity with theundraped figure acquired through pictures, statues, and theatricalrepresentations in which an illusion of natural clotheslessness isproduced and made poetic. 

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

The Impossibility of Secular Education

Now children must be taught some sort of religion. Secular education isan impossibility. Secular education comes to this: that the only reasonfor ceasing to do evil and learning to do well is that if you do not youwill be caned. This is worse than being taught in a church school thatif you become a dissenter you will go to hell; for hell is presented asthe instrument of something eternal, divine, and inevitable: you cannotevade it the moment the schoolmaster's back is turned. What confusesthis issue and leads even highly intelligent religious persons toadvocate secular education as a means of rescuing children from thestrife of rival proselytizers is the failure to distinguish betweenthe child's personal subjective need for a religion and its right toan impartially communicated historical objective knowledge of all thecreeds and Churches. Just as a child, no matter what its race and colormay be, should know that there are black men and brown men and yellowmen, and, no matter what its political convictions may be, thatthere are Monarchists and Republicans and Positivists, Socialists andUnsocialists, so it should know that there are Christians and Mahometansand Buddhists and Shintoists and so forth, and that they are on theaverage 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 andArabs, who will all be damned for taking that liberty; but it should betold that many English people think so, and that many Turks and Arabsthink the converse about English people. It should be taught that Allahis simply the name by which God is known to Turks and Arabs, who arejust as eligible for salvation as any Christian. Further, that thepractical reason why a Turkish child should pray in a mosque and anEnglish child in a church is that as worship is organized in Turkey inmosques in the name of Mahomet and in England in churches in the nameof Christ, a Turkish child joining the Church of England or an Englishchild following Mahomet will find that it has no place for its worshipand no organization of its religion within its reach. Any other teachingof the history and present facts of religion is false teaching, and ispolitically extremely dangerous in an empire in which a huge majority ofthe fellow subjects of the governing island do not profess the religionof that island. 

But this objectivity, though intellectually honest, tells the childonly what other people believe. What it should itself believe is quiteanother matter. The sort of Rationalism which says to a child "You mustsuspend your judgment until you are old enough to choose your religion"is Rationalism gone mad. The child must have a conscience and a codeof honor (which is the essence of religion) even if it be only aprovisional one, to be revised at its confirmation. For confirmation ismeant to signalize a spiritual coming of age, and may be a repudiation. Really active souls have many confirmations and repudiations as theirlife deepens and their knowledge widens. But what is to guide the childbefore its first confirmation? Not mere orders, because orders musthave a sanction of some sort or why should the child obey them? If, as aSecularist, you refuse to teach any sanction, you must say "You willbe punished if you disobey. " "Yes, " says the child to itself, "if I amfound 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 successfulfraud; and as no espionage can cover the whole range of a child'sconduct, the upshot is that the child becomes a liar and schemer with anatrophied conscience. And a good many of the orders given to it are notobeyed after all. Thus the Secularist who is not a fool is forced toappeal to the child's vital impulse towards perfection, to the divinespark; and no resolution not to call this impulse an impulse of loyaltyto the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, or obedience to the Will of God, or any other standard theological term, can alter the fact that theSecularist has stepped outside Secularism and is educating the childreligiously, even if he insists on repudiating that pious adverb andsubstituting the word metaphysically. 

Natural Selection as a Religion

We must make up our minds to it therefore that whatever measures we maybe forced to take to prevent the recruiting sergeants of the Churches, free or established, from obtaining an exclusive right of entry toschools, we shall not be able to exclude religion from them. The mosthorrible of all religions: that which teaches us to regard ourselvesas the helpless prey of a series of senseless accidents called NaturalSelection, is allowed and even welcomed in so-called secular schoolsbecause it is, in a sense, the negation of all religion; but for schoolpurposes a religion is a belief which affects conduct; and no beliefaffects conduct more radically and often so disastrously as the beliefthat the universe is a product of Natural Selection. What is more, thetheory of Natural Selection cannot be kept out of schools, becausemany of the natural facts that present the most plausible appearanceof design can be accounted for by Natural Selection; and it would be soabsurd to keep a child in delusive ignorance of so potent a factorin evolution as to keep it in ignorance of radiation or capillaryattraction. Even if you make a religion of Natural Selection, andteach the child to regard itself as the irresponsible prey of itscircumstances and appetites (or its heredity as you will perhaps callthem), you will none the less find that its appetites are stimulated byyour encouragement and daunted by your discouragement; that one of itsappetites is an appetite for perfection; that if you discourage thisappetite and encourage the cruder acquisitive appetites the child willsteal and lie and be a nuisance to you; and that if you encourage itsappetite for perfection and teach it to attach a peculiar sacrednessto it and place it before the other appetites, it will be a much nicerchild and you will have a much easier job, at which point you will, in spite of your pseudoscientific jargon, find yourself back in theold-fashioned religious teaching as deep as Dr. Watts and in factfathoms 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 perfectionshould not be cultivated in rationally scientific terms instead of beingassociated with the story of Jonah and the great fish and the thousandother 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 thewhale (they insist on its being a whale in spite of demonstrations byBible smashers without any sense of humor that Jonah would not havefitted into a whale's gullet--as if the story would be credible of awhale with an enlarged throat) and that no child on earth can standmoral instruction books or catechisms or any other statement of the casefor religion in abstract terms. The object of a moral instruction bookis not to be rational, scientific, exact, proof against controversy, noreven credible: its object is to make children good; and if it makes themsick instead its place is the waste-paper basket. 

Take for an illustration the story of Elisha and the bears. To theauthors of the moral instruction books it is in the last degreereprehensible. It is obviously not true as a record of fact; and thepicture it gives us of the temper of God (which is what interests anadult reader) is shocking and blasphemous. But it is a capital story fora child. It interests a child because it is about bears; and it leavesthe child with an impression that children who poke fun at old gentlemenand make rude remarks about bald heads are not nice children, which isa highly desirable impression, and just as much as a child is capableof receiving from the story. When a story is about God and a child, children take God for granted and criticize the child. Adults do theopposite, and are thereby led to talk great nonsense about the badeffect of Bible stories on infants. 

But let no one think that a child or anyone else can learn religion froma teacher or a book or by any academic process whatever. It is onlyby an unfettered access to the whole body of Fine Art: that is, to thewhole body of inspired revelation, that we can build up that conceptionof divinity to which all virtue is an aspiration. And to hope to findthis body of art purified from all that is obsolete or dangerousor fierce or lusty, or to pick and choose what will be good for anyparticular child, much less for all children, is the shallowestof vanities. Such schoolmasterly selection is neither possible nordesirable. Ignorance of evil is not virtue but imbecility: admiringit is like giving a prize for honesty to a man who has not stolen yourwatch because he did not know you had one. Virtue chooses good fromevil; and without knowledge there can be no choice. And even this is adangerous simplification of what actually occurs. We are not choosing:we are growing. Were you to cut all of what you call the evil out ofa child, it would drop dead. If you try to stretch it to full humanstature when it is ten years old, you will simply pull it into twopieces and be hanged. And when you try to do this morally, which is whatparents 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 abad angel: what it has to deal with is a middling angel who, in normalhealthy cases, wants to be a good angel as fast as it can withoutkilling itself in the process, which is a dangerous one. 

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

I may now say without danger of being misunderstood that the popularEnglish compromise called Cowper Templeism (unsectarian Bible education)is not so silly as it looks. It is true that the Bible inculcates halfa dozen religions: some of them barbarous; some cynical and pessimistic;some amoristic and romantic; some sceptical and challenging; somekindly, simple, and intuitional; some sophistical and intellectual; nonesuited to the character and conditions of western civilization unless itbe the Christianity which was finally suppressed by the Crucifixion, andhas never been put into practice by any State before or since. But theBible contains the ancient literature of a very remarkable Orientalrace; and the imposition of this literature, on whatever falsepretences, on our children left them more literate than if they knewno literature at all, which was the practical alternative. And as ourAuthorized Version is a great work of art as well, to know it was betterthan knowing no art, which also was the practical alternative. It isat least not a school book; and it is not a bad story book, horrible assome of the stories are. Therefore as between the Bible and the blankrepresented by secular education, the choice is with the Bible. 

The Bible

But the Bible is not sufficient. The real Bible of modern Europe is thewhole body of great literature in which the inspiration and revelationof Hebrew Scripture has been continued to the present day. Nietzsche'sThus Spake Zoroaster is less comforting to the ill and unhappy than thePsalms; but it is much truer, subtler, and more edifying. The pleasurewe get from the rhetoric of the book of Job and its tragic picture of abewildered soul cannot disguise the ignoble irrelevance of the retort ofGod with which it closes, or supply the need of such modern revelationsas Shelley's Prometheus or The Niblung's Ring of Richard Wagner. Thereis nothing in the Bible greater in inspiration than Beethoven's ninthsymphony; and the power of modern music to convey that inspiration toa modern man is far greater than that of Elizabethan English, which is, except for people steeped in the Bible from childhood like Sir WalterScott and Ruskin, a dead language. 

Besides, many who have no ear for literature or for music are accessibleto architecture, to pictures, to statues, to dresses, and to the arts ofthe 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 dawningadolescence and full maturity when the pleasures and emotions of artwill have to satisfy cravings which, if starved or insulted, may becomemorbid and seek disgraceful satisfactions, and, if prematurely gratifiedotherwise than poetically, may destroy the stamina of the race. And itmust be borne in mind that the most dangerous art for this necessarypurpose is the art that presents itself as religious ecstasy. Youngpeople are ripe for love long before they are ripe for religion. Onlya very foolish person would substitute the Imitation of Christ forTreasure Island as a present for a boy or girl, or for Byron's Don Juanas a present for a swain or lass. Pickwick is the safest saint for us inour nonage. Flaubert's Temptation of St Anthony is an excellent bookfor a man of fifty, perhaps the best within reach as a healthy study ofvisionary ecstasy; but for the purposes of a boy of fifteen Ivanhoe andthe Templar make a much better saint and devil. And the boy offifteen will find this out for himself if he is allowed to wander in awell-stocked literary garden, and hear bands and see pictures and spendhis pennies on cinematograph shows. His choice may often be ratherdisgusting to his elders when they want him to choose the best before heis ready for it. The greatest Protestant Manifesto ever written, asfar as I know, is Houston Chamberlain's Foundations of the NineteenthCentury: everybody capable of it should read it. Probably the History ofMaria Monk is at the opposite extreme of merit (this is a guess: I havenever read it); but it is certain that a boy let loose in a librarywould go for Maria Monk and have no use whatever for Mr Chamberlain. Ishould probably have read Maria Monk myself if I had not had the ArabianNights and their like to occupy me better. In art, children, likeadults, will find their level if they are left free to find it, and notrestricted to what adults think good for them. Just at present ouryoung people are going mad over ragtimes, apparently because syncopatedrhythms are new to them. If they had learnt what can be done withsyncopation from Beethoven's third Leonora overture, they would enjoythe ragtimes all the more; but they would put them in their proper placeas amusing vulgarities. 

Artist Idolatry

But there are more dangerous influences than ragtimes waiting for peoplebrought up in ignorance of fine art. Nothing is more pitiably ridiculousthan the wild worship of artists by those who have never been seasonedin youth to the enchantments of art. Tenors and prima donnas, pianistsand violinists, actors and actresses enjoy powers of seduction which inthe middle ages would have exposed them to the risk of being burntfor sorcery. But as they exercise this power by singing, playing, andacting, no great harm is done except perhaps to themselves. Far graverare the powers enjoyed by brilliant persons who are also connoisseursin art. The influence they can exercise on young people who have beenbrought up in the darkness and wretchedness of a home without art, andin whom a natural bent towards art has always been baffled and snubbed, is incredible to those who have not witnessed and understood it. He (orshe) who reveals the world of art to them opens heaven to them. Theybecome satellites, disciples, worshippers of the apostle. Now theapostle may be a voluptuary without much conscience. Nature may havegiven him enough virtue to suffice in a reasonable environment. But thisallowance may not be enough to defend him against the temptation anddemoralization of finding himself a little god on the strength ofwhat ought to be a quite ordinary culture. He may find adorers inall directions in our uncultivated society among people of strongercharacter than himself, not one of whom, if they had been artisticallyeducated, would have had anything to learn from him or regarded himas in any way extraordinary apart from his actual achievements as anartist. Tartuffe is not always a priest. Indeed he is not always arascal: he is often a weak man absurdly credited with omniscience andperfection, and taking unfair advantages only because they are offeredto him and he is too weak to refuse. Give everyone his culture, and noone will offer him more than his due. 

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

"The Machine"

When we set to work at a Constitution to secure freedom for children, wehad better bear in mind that the children may not be at all obliged tous 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 itnot lead us into the error of supposing that all men long for freedomand embrace it when it is offered to them. On the contrary, it has tobe forced on them; and even then they will give it the slip if it is notreligiously inculcated and strongly safeguarded. 

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

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

And yet we must have The Machine. It is only in unskilled hands underignorant direction that machinery is dangerous. We can no more governmodern communities without political machinery than we can feed andclothe them without industrial machinery. Shatter The Machine, and youget Anarchy. And yet The Machine works so detestably at present that wehave people who advocate Anarchy and call themselves Anarchists. 

The Provocation to Anarchism

What is valid in Anarchism is that all Governments try to simplify theirtask by destroying liberty and glorifying authority in general and theirown deeds in particular. But the difficulty in combining law andorder with free institutions is not a natural one. It is a matter ofinculcation. If people are brought up to be slaves, it is useless anddangerous to let them loose at the age of twenty-one and say "Now youare free. " No one with the tamed soul and broken spirit of a slave canbe free. It is like saying to a laborer brought up on a family income ofthirteen shillings a week, "Here is one hundred thousand pounds: now youare wealthy. " Nothing can make such a man really wealthy. Freedom andwealth are difficult and responsible conditions to which men must beaccustomed and socially trained from birth. A nation that is free attwenty-one is not free at all; just as a man first enriched at fiftyremains poor all his life, even if he does not curtail it by drinkinghimself to death in the first wild ecstasy of being able to swallow asmuch as he likes for the first time. You cannot govern men brought upas slaves otherwise than as slaves are governed. You may pile Billsof Right and Habeas Corpus Acts on Great Charters; promulgate AmericanConstitutions; burn the chateaux and guillotine the seigneurs; chopoff the heads of kings and queens and set up Democracy on the ruins offeudalism: the end of it all for us is that already in the twentiethcentury there has been as much brute coercion and savage intolerance, asmuch flogging and hanging, as much impudent injustice on the benchand 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, anddelirious indiscriminate slaughter of helpless non-combatants, oldand young, as much prostitution of professional talent, literary andpolitical, in defence of manifest wrong, as much cowardly sycophancygiving fine names to all this villainy or pretending that it is "greatlyexaggerated, " as we can find any record of from the days when theadvocacy of liberty was a capital offence and Democracy was hardlythinkable. Democracy exhibits the vanity of Louis XIV, the savageryof Peter of Russia, the nepotism and provinciality of Napoleon, thefickleness of Catherine II: in short, all the childishnesses of all thedespots without any of the qualities that enabled the greatest of themto fascinate and dominate their contemporaries. 

And the flatterers of Democracy are as impudently servile to thesuccessful, and insolent to common honest folk, as the flatterers ofthe monarchs. Democracy in America has led to the withdrawal of ordinaryrefined persons from politics; and the same result is coming in Englandas fast as we make Democracy as democratic as it is in America. This istrue also of popular religion: it is so horribly irreligious that nobodywith the smallest pretence to culture, or the least inkling of whatthe great prophets vainly tried to make the world understand, will haveanything to do with it except for purely secular reasons. 

Imagination

Before we can clearly understand how baleful is this condition ofintimidation in which we live, it is necessary to clear up the confusionmade by our use of the word imagination to denote two very differentpowers 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 imaginethings as they are without actually sensing them; and this I will callthe realistic imagination. Take for example marriage and war. One manhas a vision of perpetual bliss with a domestic angel at home, and offlashing sabres, thundering guns, victorious cavalry charges, and routedenemies in the field. That is romantic imagination; and the mischief itdoes is incalculable. It begins in silly and selfish expectations ofthe impossible, and ends in spiteful disappointment, sour grievance, cynicism, and misanthropic resistance to any attempt to better ahopeless world. The wise man knows that imagination is not only a meansof pleasing himself and beguiling tedious hours with romances and fairytales and fools' paradises (a quite defensible and delightful amusementwhen you know exactly what you are doing and where fancy ends and factsbegin), but also a means of foreseeing and being prepared for realitiesas yet unexperienced, and of testing the possibility and desirability ofserious Utopias. He does not expect his wife to be an angel; nor does heoverlook the facts that war depends on the rousing of all the murderousblackguardism still latent in mankind; that every victory means adefeat; that fatigue, hunger, terror, and disease are the raw materialwhich romancers work up into military glory; and that soldiers for themost part go to war as children go to school, because they are afraidnot to. They are afraid even to say they are afraid, as such candor ispunishable by death in the military code. 

A very little realistic imagination gives an ambitious person enormouspower over the multitudinous victims of the romantic imagination. Forthe romancer not only pleases himself with fictitious glories: he alsoterrifies himself with imaginary dangers. He does not even picture whatthese dangers are: he conceives the unknown as always dangerous. Whenyou say to a realist "You must do this" or "You must not do that, " heinstantly asks what will happen to him if he does (or does not, as thecase may be). Failing an unromantic convincing answer, he does just ashe pleases unless he can find for himself a real reason for refraining. In short, though you can intimidate him, you cannot bluff him. Butyou can always bluff the romantic person: indeed his grasp of realconsiderations is so feeble that you find it necessary to bluff him evenwhen you have solid considerations to offer him instead. The campaignsof Napoleon, with their atmosphere of glory, illustrate this. Inthe 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 purebounce. Napoleon himself, much more a realist than Ney (that was whyhe dominated him), would probably have surrendered; for sometimes thebravest of the brave will achieve successes never attempted by thecleverest of the clever. Wellington was a completer realist thanNapoleon. It was impossible to persuade Wellington that he was beatenuntil he actually was beaten. He was unbluffable; and if Napoleon hadunderstood the nature of Wellington's strength instead of returningWellington's snobbish contempt for him by an academic contempt forWellington, he would not have left the attack at Waterloo to Ney andD'Erlon, who, on that field, did not know when they were beaten, whereasWellington knew precisely when he was not beaten. The unbluffablewould have triumphed anyhow, probably, because Napoleon was an academicsoldier, doing the academic thing (the attack in columns and so forth)with superlative ability and energy; whilst Wellington was an originalsoldier who, instead of outdoing the terrible academic columns withstill more terrible and academic columns, outwitted them with the thinred line, not of heroes, but, as this uncompromising realist neverhesitated to testify, of the scum of the earth. 

Government by Bullies

These picturesque martial incidents are being reproduced every day inour ordinary life. We are bluffed by hardy simpletons and headstrongbounders as the Russians were bluffed by Ney; and our Wellingtonsare threadbound by slave-democracy as Gulliver was threadbound by theLilliputians. We are a mass of people living in a submissive routine towhich we have been drilled from our childhood. When you ask us to takethe simplest step outside that routine, we say shyly, "Oh, I reallycouldnt, " or "Oh, I shouldnt like to, " without being able to point outthe smallest harm that could possibly ensue: victims, not of a rationalfear of real dangers, but of pure abstract fear, the quintessence ofcowardice, the very negation of "the fear of God. " Dotted about amongus are a few spirits relatively free from this inculcated paralysis, sometimes because they are half-witted, sometimes because they areunscrupulously selfish, sometimes because they are realists as to moneyand unimaginative as to other things, sometimes even because they areexceptionally able, but always because they are not afraid of shadowsnor oppressed with nightmares. And we see these few rising as if bymagic into power and affluence, and forming, with the millionaires whohave accidentally gained huge riches by the occasional windfalls of ourcommerce, the governing class. Now nothing is more disastrous thana governing class that does not know how to govern. And how can thisrabble of the casual products of luck, cunning, and folly, be expectedto know how to govern? The merely lucky ones and the hereditary ones donot owe their position to their qualifications at all. As to the rest, the realism which seems their essential qualification often consists notonly in a lack of romantic imagination, which lack is a merit, butof the realistic, constructive, Utopian imagination, which lack isa ghastly defect. Freedom from imaginative illusion is therefore noguarantee whatever of nobility of character: that is why inculcatedsubmissiveness makes us slaves to people much worse than ourselves, and why it is so important that submissiveness should no longer beinculcated. 

And yet as long as you have the compulsory school as we know it, weshall have submissiveness inculcated. What is more, until the activehours of child life are organized separately from the active hours ofadult life, so that adults can enjoy the society of children in reasonwithout being tormented, disturbed, harried, burdened, and hinderedin their work by them as they would be now if there were no compulsoryschools and no children hypnotized into the belief that they must tamelygo to them and be imprisoned and beaten and over-tasked in them, weshall have schools under one pretext or another; and we shall have allthe evil consequences and all the social hopelessness that result fromturning a nation of potential freemen and freewomen into a nation oftwo-legged spoilt spaniels with everything crushed out of their natureexcept dread of the whip. Liberty is the breath of life to nations; andliberty is the one thing that parents, schoolmasters, and rulers spendtheir lives in extirpating for the sake of an immediately quiet andfinally 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".