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+Project Gutenberg's Etext of A Treatise on Parents and Children
+#1 in our series by George Bernard Shaw
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+A Treatise on Parents and Children
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+by George Bernard Shaw
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+May, 1997  [Etext #908]
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+
+
+
+A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN
+
+BY BERNARD SHAW
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+Parents and Children
+Trailing Clouds of Glory
+The Child is Father to the Man
+What is a Child?
+The Sin of Nadab and Abihu
+The Manufacture of Monsters
+Small and Large Families
+Children as Nuisances
+Child Fanciers
+Childhood as a State of Sin
+School
+My Scholastic Acquirements
+Schoolmasters of Genius
+What We Do Not Teach, and Why
+Taboo in Schools
+Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools
+What is to be Done?
+Children's Rights and Duties
+Should Children Earn their Living?
+Children's Happiness
+The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday
+University Schoolboyishness
+The New Laziness
+The Infinite School Task
+The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge
+English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual Cowardice
+The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness
+The Common Sense of Toleration
+The Sin of Athanasius
+The Experiment Experimenting
+Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport
+Antichrist
+Under the Whip
+Technical Instruction
+Docility and Dependence
+The Abuse of Docility
+The Schoolboy and the Homeboy
+The Comings of Age of Children
+The Conflict of Wills
+The Demagogue's Opportunity
+Our Quarrelsomeness
+We Must Reform Society before we can Reform Ourselves
+The Pursuit of Manners
+Not too much Wind on the Heath, Brother
+Wanted:  a Child's Magna Charta
+The Pursuit of Learning
+Children and Game:  a Proposal
+The Parents' Intolerable Burden
+Mobilization
+Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs
+How Little We Know About Our Parents
+Our Abandoned Mothers
+Family Affection
+The Fate of the Family
+Family Mourning
+Art Teaching
+The Impossibility of Secular Education
+Natural Selection as a Religion
+Moral Instruction Leagues
+The Bible
+Artist Idolatry
+"The Machine"
+The Provocation to Anarchism
+Imagination
+Government by Bullies
+
+
+
+
+PARENTS AND CHILDREN
+
+
+Trailing Clouds of Glory
+
+Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of
+the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated.  The Life Force
+either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very low
+organisms:  indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba
+is immortal.  Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer
+than their friends the dogs.  Turtles, parrots, and elephants are
+believed to be capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human
+inhabitant.  But the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves
+that they are not immortal.  Do away with death and you do away with
+the need for birth:  in fact if you went on breeding, you would
+finally have to kill old people to make room for young ones.
+
+Now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the
+Life Force.  People with no imagination try to make things which will
+last for ever, and even want to live for ever themselves.  But the
+intelligently imaginative man knows very well that it is waste of
+labor to make a machine that will last ten years, because it will
+probably be superseded in half that time by an improved machine
+answering the same purpose.  He also knows that if some devil were to
+convince us that our dream of personal immortality is no dream but a
+hard fact, such a shriek of despair would go up from the human race as
+no other conceivable horror could provoke.  With all our perverse
+nonsense as to John Smith living for a thousand million eons and for
+ever after, we die voluntarily, knowing that it is time for us to be
+scrapped, to be remanufactured, to come back, as Wordsworth divined,
+trailing ever brightening clouds of glory.  We must all be born again,
+and yet again and again.  We should like to live a little longer just
+as we should like 50 pounds:  that is, we should take it if we could
+get it for nothing; but that sort of idle liking is not will.  It is
+amazing--considering the way we talk--how little a man will do to get
+50 pounds:  all the 50-pound notes I have ever known of have been more
+easily earned than a laborious sixpence; but the difficulty of
+inducing a man to make any serious effort to obtain 50 pounds is
+nothing to the difficulty of inducing him to make a serious effort to
+keep alive.  The moment he sees death approach, he gets into bed and
+sends for a doctor.  He knows very well at the back of his conscience
+that he is rather a poor job and had better be remanufactured.  He
+knows that his death will make room for a birth; and he hopes that it
+will be a birth of something that he aspired to be and fell short of.
+He knows that it is through death and rebirth that this corruptible
+shall become incorruptible, and this mortal put on immortality.
+Practise as you will on his ignorance, his fears, and his imagination,
+with bribes of paradises and threats of hells, there is only one
+belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory;
+and that is the belief that we can lay down the burden of our wretched
+little makeshift individualities for ever at each lift towards the
+goal of evolution, which can only be a being that cannot be improved
+upon.  After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of
+believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to
+himself?  Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be
+made perfect first.  But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be
+myself, nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present
+imperfections (and what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that
+you may just as well give me a new name and face the fact that I am a
+new person and that the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton.  Thus,
+oddly enough, the conventional belief in the matter comes to this:
+that if you wish to live for ever you must be wicked enough to be
+irretrievably damned, since the saved are no longer what they were,
+and in hell alone do people retain their sinful nature:  that is to
+say, their individuality.  And this sort of hell, however convenient
+as a means of intimidating persons who have practically no honor and
+no conscience, is not a fact.  Death is for many of us the gate of
+hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
+Therefore let us give up telling one another idle stories, and rejoice
+in death as we rejoice in birth; for without death we cannot be born
+again; and the man who does not wish to be born again and born better
+is fit only to represent the City of London in Parliament, or perhaps
+the university of Oxford.
+
+
+
+The Child is Father to the Man
+
+Is he?  Then in the name of common sense why do we always treat
+children on the assumption that the man is father to the child?  Oh,
+these fathers!  And we are not content with fathers:  we must have
+godfathers, forgetting that the child is godfather to the man.  Has it
+ever struck you as curious that in a country where the first article
+of belief is that every child is born with a godfather whom we all
+call "our father which art in heaven," two very limited individual
+mortals should be allowed to appear at its baptism and explain that
+they are its godparents, and that they will look after its salvation
+until it is no longer a child.  I had a godmother who made herself
+responsible in this way for me.  She presented me with a Bible with a
+gilt clasp and edges, larger than the Bibles similarly presented to my
+sisters, because my sex entitled me to a heavier article.  I must have
+seen that lady at least four times in the twenty years following.  She
+never alluded to my salvation in any way.  People occasionally ask me
+to act as godfather to their children with a levity which convinces me
+that they have not the faintest notion that it involves anything more
+than calling the helpless child George Bernard without regard to the
+possibility that it may grow up in the liveliest abhorrence of my
+notions.
+
+A person with a turn for logic might argue that if God is the Father
+of all men, and if the child is father to the man, it follows that the
+true representative of God at the christening is the child itself.
+But such posers are unpopular, because they imply that our little
+customs, or, as we often call them, our religion, mean something, or
+must originally have meant something, and that we understand and
+believe that something.
+
+However, my business is not to make confusion worse confounded, but to
+clear it up.  Only, it is as well to begin by a sample of current
+thought and practice which shews that on the subject of children we
+are very deeply confused.  On the whole, whatever our theory or no
+theory may be, our practice is to treat the child as the property of
+its immediate physical parents, and to allow them to do what they like
+with it as far as it will let them.  It has no rights and no
+liberties:  in short, its condition is that which adults recognize as
+the most miserable and dangerous politically possible for themselves:
+namely, the condition of slavery.  For its alleviation we trust to the
+natural affection of the parties, and to public opinion.  A father
+cannot for his own credit let his son go in rags.  Also, in a very
+large section of the population, parents finally become dependent on
+their children.  Thus there are checks on child slavery which do not
+exist, or are less powerful, in the case of manual and industrial
+slavery.  Sensationally bad cases fall into two classes, which are
+really the same class:  namely, the children whose parents are
+excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of petting children, and
+the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the sensual
+luxury of physically torturing them.  There is a Society for the
+Prevention of Cruelty to Children which has effectually made an end of
+our belief that mothers are any more to be trusted than stepmothers,
+or fathers than slave-drivers.  And there is a growing body of law
+designed to prevent parents from using their children ruthlessly to
+make money for the household.  Such legislation has always been
+furiously resisted by the parents, even when the horrors of factory
+slavery were at their worst; and the extension of such legislation at
+present would be impossible if it were not that the parents affected
+by it cannot control a majority of votes in Parliament.  In domestic
+life a great deal of service is done by children, the girls acting as
+nursemaids and general servants, and the lads as errand boys.  In the
+country both boys and girls do a substantial share of farm labor.
+This is why it is necessary to coerce poor parents to send their
+children to school, though in the relatively small class which keeps
+plenty of servants it is impossible to induce parents to keep their
+children at home instead of paying schoolmasters to take them off
+their hands.
+
+It appears then that the bond of affection between parents and
+children does not save children from the slavery that denial of rights
+involves in adult political relations.  It sometimes intensifies it,
+sometimes mitigates it; but on the whole children and parents confront
+one another as two classes in which all the political power is on one
+side; and the results are not at all unlike what they would be if
+there were no immediate consanguinity between them, and one were white
+and the other black, or one enfranchised and the other
+disenfranchised, or one ranked as gentle and the other simple.  Not
+that Nature counts for nothing in the case and political rights for
+everything.  But a denial of political rights, and the resultant
+delivery of one class into the mastery of another, affects their
+relations so extensively and profoundly that it is impossible to
+ascertain what the real natural relations of the two classes are until
+this political relation is abolished.
+
+
+
+What is a Child?
+
+An experiment.  A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect:
+that is, to make humanity divine.  And you will vitiate the experiment
+if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure
+of your own:  for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly
+woman.  If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a
+pet to be played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to
+make money for you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight
+its way through in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its
+instincts will resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the
+resistance; but if you begin with its own holiest aspirations, and
+suborn them for your own purposes, then there is hardly any limit to
+the mischief you may do.  Swear at a child, throw your boots at it,
+send it flying from the room with a cuff or a kick; and the experience
+will be as instructive to the child as a difficulty with a
+short-tempered dog or a bull.  Francis Place tells us that his father
+always struck his children when he found one within his reach.  The
+effect on the young Places seems to have been simply to make them keep
+out of their father's way, which was no doubt what he desired, as far
+as he desired anything at all.  Francis records the habit without
+bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his father respected
+the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of it; and this made
+it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to his country as that rare
+and admirable thing, a Freethinker:  the only sort of thinker, I may
+remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose religious convictions,
+command any respect.
+
+Now Mr Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father; and
+I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one.  But as
+compared with the conventional good father who deliberately imposes
+himself on his son as a god; who takes advantage of childish credulity
+and parent worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is
+right and what he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding
+conduct on the child by a system of prohibitions and penalties,
+rewards and eulogies, for which he claims divine sanction:  compared
+to this sort of abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears
+almost as a Providence.  Not that it is possible to live with children
+any more than with grown-up people without imposing rules of conduct
+on them.  There is a point at which every person with human nerves has
+to say to a child "Stop that noise."  But suppose the child asks why!
+There are various answers in use.  The simplest:  "Because it
+irritates me," may fail; for it may strike the child as being rather
+amusing to irritate you; also the child, having comparatively no
+nerves, may be unable to conceive your meaning vividly enough.  In any
+case it may want to make a noise more than to spare your feelings.
+You may therefore have to explain that the effect of the irritation
+will be that you will do something unpleasant if the noise continues.
+The something unpleasant may be only a look of suffering to rouse the
+child's affectionate sympathy (if it has any), or it may run to
+forcible expulsion from the room with plenty of unnecessary violence;
+but the principle is the same:  there are no false pretences involved:
+the child learns in a straightforward way that it does not pay to be
+inconsiderate.  Also, perhaps, that Mamma, who made the child learn
+the Sermon on the Mount, is not really a Christian.
+
+
+
+The Sin of Nadab and Abihu
+
+But there is another sort of answer in wide use which is neither
+straightforward, instructive, nor harmless.  In its simplest form it
+substitutes for "Stop that noise," "Dont be naughty," which means that
+the child, instead of annoying you by a perfectly healthy and natural
+infantile procedure, is offending God.  This is a blasphemous lie; and
+the fact that it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does not excuse
+it in the least.  Dickens tells us of a nurserymaid who elaborated it
+into "If you do that, angels wont never love you."  I remember a
+servant who used to tell me that if I were not good, by which she
+meant if I did not behave with a single eye to her personal
+convenience, the cock would come down the chimney.  Less imaginative
+but equally dishonest people told me I should go to hell if I did not
+make myself agreeable to them.  Bodily violence, provided it be the
+hasty expression of normal provoked resentment and not vicious
+cruelty, cannot harm a child as this sort of pious fraud harms it.
+There is a legal limit to physical cruelty; and there are also human
+limits to it.  There is an active Society which brings to book a good
+many parents who starve and torture and overwork their children, and
+intimidates a good many more.  When parents of this type are caught,
+they are treated as criminals; and not infrequently the police have
+some trouble to save them from being lynched.  The people against whom
+children are wholly unprotected are those who devote themselves to the
+very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is called bringing
+up a child in the way it should go.  Now nobody knows the way a child
+should go.  All the ways discovered so far lead to the horrors of our
+existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by Ruskin as heaps
+of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another for scraps of
+food.  Pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that precious and sacred
+thing the child's conscience into an instrument of our own
+convenience, and to use that wonderful and terrible power called Shame
+to grind our own axe.  It is the sin of stealing fire from the altar:
+a sin so impudently practised by popes, parents, and pedagogues, that
+one can hardly expect the nurserymaids to see any harm in stealing a
+few cinders when they are worrited.
+
+Into the blackest depths of this violation of children's souls one can
+hardly bear to look; for here we find pious fraud masking the
+violation of the body by obscene cruelty.  Any parent or school
+teacher who takes a secret and abominable delight in torture is
+allowed to lay traps into which every child must fall, and then beat
+it to his or her heart's content.  A gentleman once wrote to me and
+said, with an obvious conviction that he was being most reasonable and
+high minded, that the only thing he beat his children for was failure
+in perfect obedience and perfect truthfulness.  On these attributes,
+he said, he must insist.  As one of them is not a virtue at all, and
+the other is the attribute of a god, one can imagine what the lives of
+this gentleman's children would have been if it had been possible for
+him to live down to his monstrous and foolish pretensions.  And yet he
+might have written his letter to The Times (he very nearly did, by the
+way) without incurring any danger of being removed to an asylum, or
+even losing his reputation for taking a very proper view of his
+parental duties.  And at least it was not a trivial view, nor an ill
+meant one.  It was much more respectable than the general consensus of
+opinion that if a school teacher can devise a question a child cannot
+answer, or overhear it calling omega omeega, he or she may beat the
+child viciously.  Only, the cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral
+excuse, and a pretence of reluctance.  It must be for the child's
+good.  The assailant must say "This hurts me more than it hurts you."
+There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty.  The injury to the child
+would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly "I beat you because I
+like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I can contrive an excuse
+for it."  But to represent this detestable lust to the child as Divine
+wrath, and the cruelty as the beneficent act of God, which is exactly
+what all our floggers do, is to add to the torture of the body, out of
+which the flogger at least gets some pleasure, the maiming and
+blinding of the child's soul, which can bring nothing but horror to
+anyone.
+
+
+
+The Manufacture of Monsters
+
+This industry is by no means peculiar to China.  The Chinese (they
+say) make physical monsters.  We revile them for it and proceed to
+make moral monsters of our own children.  The most excusable parents
+are those who try to correct their own faults in their offspring.  The
+parent who says to his child:  "I am one of the successes of the
+Almighty:  therefore imitate me in every particular or I will have the
+skin off your back" (a quite common attitude) is a much more absurd
+figure than the man who, with a pipe in his mouth, thrashes his boy
+for smoking.  If you must hold yourself up to your children as an
+object lesson (which is not at all necessary), hold yourself up as a
+warning and not as an example.  But you had much better let the
+child's character alone.  If you once allow yourself to regard a child
+as so much material for you to manufacture into any shape that happens
+to suit your fancy you are defeating the experiment of the Life Force.
+You are assuming that the child does not know its own business, and
+that you do.  In this you are sure to be wrong:  the child feels the
+drive of the Life Force (often called the Will of God); and you cannot
+feel it for him.  Handel's parents no doubt thought they knew better
+than their child when they tried to prevent his becoming a musician.
+They would have been equally wrong and equally unsuccessful if they
+had tried to prevent the child becoming a great rascal had its genius
+lain in that direction.  Handel would have been Handel, and Napoleon
+and Peter of Russia _them_selves in spite of all the parents in
+creation, because, as often happens, they were stronger than their
+parents.  But this does not happen always.  Most children can be, and
+many are, hopelessly warped and wasted by parents who are ignorant and
+silly enough to suppose that they know what a human being ought to be,
+and who stick at nothing in their determination to force their
+children into their moulds.  Every child has a right to its own bent.
+It has a right to be a Plymouth Brother though its parents be
+convinced atheists.  It has a right to dislike its mother or father or
+sister or brother or uncle or aunt if they are antipathetic to it.  It
+has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way
+seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has.  It has a
+right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as
+if it were its own father.
+
+
+
+Small and Large Families
+
+These rights have now become more important than they used to be,
+because the modern practice of limiting families enables them to be
+more effectually violated.  In a family of ten, eight, six, or even
+four children, the rights of the younger ones to a great extent take
+care of themselves and of the rights of the elder ones too.  Two adult
+parents, in spite of a house to keep and an income to earn, can still
+interfere to a disastrous extent with the rights and liberties of one
+child.  But by the time a fourth child has arrived, they are not only
+outnumbered two to one, but are getting tired of the thankless and
+mischievous job of bringing up their children in the way they think
+they should go.  The old observation that members of large families
+get on in the world holds good because in large families it is
+impossible for each child to receive what schoolmasters call
+"individual attention."  The children may receive a good deal of
+individual attention from one another in the shape of outspoken
+reproach, ruthless ridicule, and violent resistance to their attempts
+at aggression; but the parental despots are compelled by the multitude
+of their subjects to resort to political rather than personal rule,
+and to spread their attempts at moral monster-making over so many
+children, that each child has enough freedom, and enough sport in the
+prophylactic process of laughing at its elders behind their backs, to
+escape with much less damage than the single child.  In a large school
+the system may be bad; but the personal influence of the head master
+has to be exerted, when it is exerted at all, in a public way, because
+he has little more power of working on the affections of the
+individual scholar in the intimate way that, for example, the mother
+of a single child can, than the prime minister has of working on the
+affections of any individual voter.
+
+
+
+Children as Nuisances
+
+Experienced parents, when children's rights are preached to them, very
+naturally ask whether children are to be allowed to do what they like.
+The best reply is to ask whether adults are to be allowed to do what
+they like.  The two cases are the same.  The adult who is nasty is not
+allowed to do what he likes:  neither can the child who likes to be
+nasty.  There is no difference in principle between the rights of a
+child and those of an adult:  the difference in their cases is one of
+circumstance.  An adult is not supposed to be punished except by
+process of law; nor, when he is so punished, is the person whom he has
+injured allowed to act as judge, jury, and executioner.  It is true
+that employers do act in this way every day to their workpeople; but
+this is not a justified and intended part of the situation:  it is an
+abuse of Capitalism which nobody defends in principle.  As between
+child and parent or nurse it is not argued about because it is
+inevitable.  You cannot hold an impartial judicial inquiry every time
+a child misbehaves itself.  To allow the child to misbehave without
+instantly making it unpleasantly conscious of the fact would be to
+spoil it.  The adult has therefore to take action of some sort with
+nothing but his conscience to shield the child from injustice or
+unkindness.  The action may be a torrent of scolding culminating in a
+furious smack causing terror and pain, or it may be a remonstrance
+causing remorse, or it may be a sarcasm causing shame and humiliation,
+or it may be a sermon causing the child to believe that it is a little
+reprobate on the road to hell.  The child has no defence in any case
+except the kindness and conscience of the adult; and the adult had
+better not forget this; for it involves a heavy responsibility.
+
+And now comes our difficulty.  The responsibility, being so heavy,
+cannot be discharged by persons of feeble character or intelligence.
+And yet people of high character and intelligence cannot be plagued
+with the care of children.  A child is a restless, noisy little
+animal, with an insatiable appetite for knowledge, and consequently a
+maddening persistence in asking questions.  If the child is to remain
+in the room with a highly intelligent and sensitive adult, it must be
+told, and if necessary forced, to sit still and not speak, which is
+injurious to its health, unnatural, unjust, and therefore cruel and
+selfish beyond toleration.  Consequently the highly intelligent and
+sensitive adult hands the child over to a nurserymaid who has no
+nerves and can therefore stand more noise, but who has also no
+scruples, and may therefore be very bad company for the child.
+
+Here we have come to the central fact of the question:  a fact nobody
+avows, which is yet the true explanation of the monstrous system of
+child imprisonment and torture which we disguise under such
+hypocrisies as education, training, formation of character and the
+rest of it.  This fact is simply that a child is a nuisance to a
+grown-up person.  What is more, the nuisance becomes more and more
+intolerable as the grown-up person becomes more cultivated, more
+sensitive, and more deeply engaged in the highest methods of adult
+work.  The child at play is noisy and ought to be noisy:  Sir Isaac
+Newton at work is quiet and ought to be quiet.  And the child should
+spend most of its time at play, whilst the adult should spend most of
+his time at work.  I am not now writing on behalf of persons who
+coddle themselves into a ridiculous condition of nervous feebleness,
+and at last imagine themselves unable to work under conditions of
+bustle which to healthy people are cheerful and stimulating.  I am
+sure that if people had to choose between living where the noise of
+children never stopped and where it was never heard, all the
+goodnatured and sound people would prefer the incessant noise to the
+incessant silence.  But that choice is not thrust upon us by the
+nature of things.  There is no reason why children and adults should
+not see just as much of one another as is good for them, no more and
+no less.  Even at present you are not compelled to choose between
+sending your child to a boarding school (which means getting rid of it
+altogether on more or less hypocritical pretences) and keeping it
+continually at home.  Most working folk today either send their
+children to day schools or turn them out of doors.  This solves the
+problem for the parents.  It does not solve it for the children, any
+more than the tethering of a goat in a field or the chasing of an
+unlicensed dog into the streets solves it for the goat or the dog; but
+it shews that in no class are people willing to endure the society of
+their children, and consequently that it is an error to believe that
+the family provides children with edifying adult society, or that the
+family is a social unit.  The family is in that, as in so many other
+respects, a humbug.  Old people and young people cannot walk at the
+same pace without distress and final loss of health to one of the
+parties.  When they are sitting indoors they cannot endure the same
+degrees of temperature and the same supplies of fresh air.  Even if
+the main factors of noise, restlessness, and inquisitiveness are left
+out of account, children can stand with indifference sights, sounds,
+smells, and disorders that would make an adult of fifty utterly
+miserable; whilst on the other hand such adults find a tranquil
+happiness in conditions which to children mean unspeakable boredom.
+And since our system is nevertheless to pack them all into the same
+house and pretend that they are happy, and that this particular sort
+of happiness is the foundation of virtue, it is found that in
+discussing family life we never speak of actual adults or actual
+children, or of realities of any sort, but always of ideals such as
+The Home, a Mother's Influence, a Father's Care, Filial Piety, Duty,
+Affection, Family Life, etc. etc., which are no doubt very comforting
+phrases, but which beg the question of what a home and a mother's
+influence and a father's care and so forth really come to in practice.
+How many hours a week of the time when his children are out of bed
+does the ordinary bread-winning father spend in the company of his
+children or even in the same building with them?  The home may be a
+thieves' kitchen, the mother a procuress, the father a violent
+drunkard; or the mother and father may be fashionable people who see
+their children three or four times a year during the holidays, and
+then not oftener than they can help, living meanwhile in daily and
+intimate contact with their valets and lady's-maids, whose influence
+and care are often dominant in the household.  Affection, as
+distinguished from simple kindliness, may or may not exist:  when it
+does it either depends on qualities in the parties that would produce
+it equally if they were of no kin to one another, or it is a more or
+less morbid survival of the nursing passion; for affection between
+adults (if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown-up
+children) and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children
+necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called
+natural:  in fact the evidence shews that it is easier to love the
+company of a dog than of a commonplace child between the ages of six
+and the beginnings of controlled maturity; for women who cannot bear
+to be separated from their pet dogs send their children to boarding
+schools cheerfully.  They may say and even believe that in allowing
+their children to leave home they are sacrificing themselves for their
+children's good; but there are very few pet dogs who would not be the
+better for a month or two spent elsewhere than in a lady's lap or
+roasting on a drawingroom hearthrug.  Besides, to allege that children
+are better continually away from home is to give up the whole popular
+sentimental theory of the family; yet the dogs are kept and the
+children are banished.
+
+
+
+Child Fanciers
+
+There is, however, a good deal of spurious family affection.  There is
+the clannishness that will make a dozen brothers and sisters who
+quarrel furiously among themselves close up their ranks and make
+common cause against a brother-in-law or a sister-in-law.  And there
+is a strong sense of property in children, which often makes mothers
+and fathers bitterly jealous of allowing anyone else to interfere with
+their children, whom they may none the less treat very badly.  And
+there is an extremely dangerous craze for children which leads certain
+people to establish orphanages and baby farms and schools, seizing any
+pretext for filling their houses with children exactly as some
+eccentric old ladies and gentlemen fill theirs with cats.  In such
+places the children are the victims of all the caprices of doting
+affection and all the excesses of lascivious cruelty.  Yet the people
+who have this morbid craze seldom have any difficulty in finding
+victims.  Parents and guardians are so worried by children and so
+anxious to get rid of them that anyone who is willing to take them off
+their hands is welcomed and whitewashed.  The very people who read
+with indignation of Squeers and Creakle in the novels of Dickens are
+quite ready to hand over their own children to Squeers and Creakle,
+and to pretend that Squeers and Creakle are monsters of the past.  But
+read the autobiography of Stanley the traveller, or sit in the company
+of men talking about their school-days, and you will soon find that
+fiction, which must, if it is to be sold and read, stop short of being
+positively sickening, dare not tell the whole truth about the people
+to whom children are handed over on educational pretexts.  Not very
+long ago a schoolmaster in Ireland was murdered by his boys; and for
+reasons which were never made public it was at first decided not to
+prosecute the murderers.  Yet all these flogging schoolmasters and
+orphanage fiends and baby farmers are "lovers of children."  They are
+really child fanciers (like bird fanciers or dog fanciers) by
+irresistible natural predilection, never happy unless they are
+surrounded by their victims, and always certain to make their living
+by accepting the custody of children, no matter how many alternative
+occupations may be available.  And bear in mind that they are only the
+extreme instances of what is commonly called natural affection,
+apparently because it is obviously unnatural.
+
+The really natural feeling of adults for children in the long prosaic
+intervals between the moments of affectionate impulse is just that
+feeling that leads them to avoid their care and constant company as a
+burden beyond bearing, and to pretend that the places they send them
+to are well conducted, beneficial, and indispensable to the success of
+the children in after life.  The true cry of the kind mother after her
+little rosary of kisses is "Run away, darling."  It is nicer than
+"Hold your noise, you young devil; or it will be the worse for you";
+but fundamentally it means the same thing:  that if you compel an
+adult and a child to live in one another's company either the adult or
+the child will be miserable.  There is nothing whatever unnatural or
+wrong or shocking in this fact; and there is no harm in it if only it
+be sensibly faced and provided for.  The mischief that it does at
+present is produced by our efforts to ignore it, or to smother it
+under a heap of sentimental lies and false pretences.
+
+
+
+Childhood as a State of Sin
+
+Unfortunately all this nonsense tends to accumulate as we become more
+sympathetic.  In many families it is still the custom to treat
+childhood frankly as a state of sin, and impudently proclaim the
+monstrous principle that little children should be seen and not heard,
+and to enforce a set of prison rules designed solely to make
+cohabitation with children as convenient as possible for adults
+without the smallest regard for the interests, either remote or
+immediate, of the children.  This system tends to produce a tough,
+rather brutal, stupid, unscrupulous class, with a fixed idea that all
+enjoyment consists in undetected sinning; and in certain phases of
+civilization people of this kind are apt to get the upper hand of more
+amiable and conscientious races and classes.  They have the ferocity
+of a chained dog, and are proud of it.  But the end of it is that they
+are always in chains, even at the height of their military or
+political success:  they win everything on condition that they are
+afraid to enjoy it.  Their civilizations rest on intimidation, which
+is so necessary to them that when they cannot find anybody brave
+enough to intimidate them they intimidate themselves and live in a
+continual moral and political panic.  In the end they get found out
+and bullied.  But that is not the point that concerns us here, which
+is, that they are in some respects better brought up than the children
+of sentimental people who are always anxious and miserable about their
+duty to their children, and who end by neither making their children
+happy nor having a tolerable life for themselves.  A selfish tyrant
+you know where to have, and he (or she) at least does not confuse your
+affections; but a conscientious and kindly meddler may literally worry
+you out of your senses.  It is fortunate that only very few parents
+are capable of doing what they conceive their duty continuously or
+even at all, and that still fewer are tough enough to ride roughshod
+over their children at home.
+
+
+
+School
+
+But please observe the limitation "at home."  What private amateur
+parental enterprise cannot do may be done very effectively by
+organized professional enterprise in large institutions established
+for the purpose.  And it is to such professional enterprise that
+parents hand over their children when they can afford it.  They send
+their children to school; and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth
+intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.  To begin with,
+it is a prison.  But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison.
+In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by
+the warders and the governor (who of course would not be warders and
+governors if they could write readable books), and beaten or otherwise
+tormented if you cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents.
+In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys
+discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they dont
+understand and dont care about, and are therefore incapable of making
+you understand or care about.  In a prison they may torture your body;
+but they do not torture your brains; and they protect you against
+violence and outrage from your fellow prisoners.  In a school you have
+none of these advantages.  With the world's bookshelves loaded with
+fascinating and inspired books, the very manna sent down from Heaven
+to feed your souls, you are forced to read a hideous imposture called
+a school book, written by a man who cannot write:  a book from which
+no human being can learn anything:  a book which, though you may
+decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the
+enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest
+of your life.  With millions of acres of woods and valleys and hills
+and wind and air and birds and streams and fishes and all sorts of
+instructive and healthy things easily accessible, or with streets and
+shop windows and crowds and vehicles and all sorts of city delights at
+the door, you are forced to sit, not in a room with some human grace
+and comfort or furniture and decoration, but in a stalled pound with a
+lot of other children, beaten if you talk, beaten if you move, beaten
+if you cannot prove by answering idiotic questions that even when you
+escaped from the pound and from the eye of your gaoler, you were still
+agonizing over his detestable sham books instead of daring to live.
+And your childish hatred of your gaoler and flogger is nothing to his
+adult hatred of you; for he is a slave forced to endure your society
+for his daily bread.  You have not even the satisfaction of knowing
+how you are torturing him and how he loathes you; and you give
+yourself unnecessary pains to annoy him with furtive tricks and
+spiteful doing of forbidden things.  No wonder he is sometimes
+provoked to fiendish outbursts of wrath.  No wonder men of downright
+sense, like Dr Johnson, admit that under such circumstances children
+will not learn anything unless they are so cruelly beaten that they
+make desperate efforts to memorize words and phrases to escape
+flagellation.  It is a ghastly business, quite beyond words, this
+schooling.
+
+And now I hear cries of protest arising all round.  First my own
+schoolmasters, or their ghosts, asking whether I was cruelly beaten at
+school?  No; but then I did not learn anything at school.  Dr
+Johnson's schoolmaster presumably did care enough whether Sam learned
+anything to beat him savagely enough to force him to lame his mind
+--for Johnson's great mind _was_ lamed--by learning his lessons.  None
+of my schoolmasters really cared a rap (or perhaps it would be fairer
+to them to say that their employers did not care a rap and therefore
+did not give them the necessary caning powers) whether I learnt my
+lessons or not, provided my father paid my schooling bill, the
+collection of which was the real object of the school.  Consequently I
+did not learn my school lessons, having much more important ones in
+hand, with the result that I have not wasted my life trifling with
+literary fools in taverns as Johnson did when he should have been
+shaking England with the thunder of his spirit.  My schooling did me a
+great deal of harm and no good whatever:  it was simply dragging a
+child's soul through the dirt; but I escaped Squeers and Creakle just
+as I escaped Johnson and Carlyle.  And this is what happens to most of
+us.  We are not effectively coerced to learn:  we stave off punishment
+as far as we can by lying and trickery and guessing and using our
+wits; and when this does not suffice we scribble impositions, or
+suffer extra imprisonments--"keeping in" was the phrase in my time--or
+let a master strike us with a cane and fall back on our pride at being
+able to hear it physically (he not being allowed to hit us too hard)
+to outface the dishonor we should have been taught to die rather than
+endure.  And so idleness and worthlessness on the one hand and a
+pretence of coercion on the other became a despicable routine.  If my
+schoolmasters had been really engaged in educating me instead of
+painfully earning their bread by keeping me from annoying my elders
+they would have turned me out of the school, telling me that I was
+thoroughly disloyal to it; that I had no intention of learning; that I
+was mocking and distracting the boys who did wish to learn; that I was
+a liar and a shirker and a seditious little nuisance; and that nothing
+could injure me in character and degrade their occupation more than
+allowing me (much less forcing me) to remain in the school under such
+conditions.  But in order to get expelled, it was necessary commit a
+crime of such atrocity that the parents of other boys would have
+threatened to remove their sons sooner than allow them to be
+schoolfellows with the delinquent.  I can remember only one case in
+which such a penalty was threatened; and in that case the culprit, a
+boarder, had kissed a housemaid, or possibly, being a handsome youth,
+been kissed by her.  She did not kiss me; and nobody ever dreamt of
+expelling me.  The truth was, a boy meant just so much a year to the
+institution.  That was why he was kept there against his will.  That
+was why he was kept there when his expulsion would have been an
+unspeakable relief and benefit both to his teachers and himself.
+
+It may be argued that if the uncommercial attitude had been taken, and
+all the disloyal wasters and idlers shewn sternly to the door, the
+school would not have been emptied, but filled.  But so honest an
+attitude was impossible.  The masters must have hated the school much
+more than the boys did.  Just as you cannot imprison a man without
+imprisoning a warder to see that he does not escape, the warder being
+tied to the prison as effectually by the fear of unemployment and
+starvation as the prisoner is by the bolts and bars, so these poor
+schoolmasters, with their small salaries and large classes, were as
+much prisoners as we were, and much more responsible and anxious ones.
+They could not impose the heroic attitude on their employers; nor
+would they have been able to obtain places as schoolmasters if their
+habits had been heroic.  For the best of them their employment was
+provisional:  they looked forward to escaping from it into the pulpit.
+The ablest and most impatient of them were often so irritated by the
+awkward, slow-witted, slovenly boys:  that is, the ones that required
+special consideration and patient treatment, that they vented their
+irritation on them ruthlessly, nothing being easier than to entrap or
+bewilder such a boy into giving a pretext for punishing him.
+
+
+
+My Scholastic Acquirements
+
+The results, as far as I was concerned, were what might have been
+expected.  My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching
+anything but Latin and Greek.  When I went there as a very small boy I
+knew a good deal of Latin grammar which I had been taught in a few
+weeks privately by my uncle.  When I had been several years at school
+this same uncle examined me and discovered that the net result of my
+schooling was that I had forgotten what he had taught me, and had
+learnt nothing else.  To this day, though I can still decline a Latin
+noun and repeat some of the old paradigms in the old meaningless way,
+because their rhythm sticks to me, I have never yet seen a Latin
+inscription on a tomb that I could translate throughout.  Of Greek I
+can decipher perhaps the greater part of the Greek alphabet.  In
+short, I am, as to classical education, another Shakespear.  I can
+read French as easily as English; and under pressure of necessity I
+can turn to account some scraps of German and a little operatic
+Italian; but these I was never taught at school.  Instead, I was
+taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty stories, a
+blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as obscene jokes,
+hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the blackguard's
+shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards.  And if I had
+been a boarder at an English public school instead of a day boy at an
+Irish one, I might have had to add to these, deeper shames still.
+
+
+
+Schoolmasters of Genius
+
+And now, if I have reduced the ghosts of my schoolmasters to
+melancholy acquiescence in all this (which everybody who has been at
+an ordinary school will recognize as true), I have still to meet the
+much more sincere protests of the handful of people who have a natural
+genius for "bringing up" children.  I shall be asked with kindly scorn
+whether I have heard of Froebel and Pestalozzi, whether I know the
+work that is being done by Miss Mason and the Dottoressa Montessori
+or, best of all as I think, the Eurythmics School of Jacques Dalcroze
+at Hellerau near Dresden.  Jacques Dalcroze, like Plato, believes in
+saturating his pupils with music.  They walk to music, play to music,
+work to music, obey drill commands that would bewilder a guardsman to
+music, think to music, live to music, get so clearheaded about music
+that they can move their several limbs each in a different metre until
+they become complicated living magazines of cross rhythms, and, what
+is more, make music for others to do all these things to.  Stranger
+still, though Jacques Dalcroze, like all these great teachers, is the
+completest of tyrants, knowing what is right and that he must and will
+have the lesson just so or else break his heart (not somebody else's,
+observe), yet his school is so fascinating that every woman who sees
+it exclaims "Oh, why was I not taught like this!" and elderly
+gentlemen excitedly enrol themselves as students and distract classes
+of infants by their desperate endeavors to beat two in a bar with one
+hand and three with the other, and start off on earnest walks round
+the room, taking two steps backward whenever Monsieur Daleroze calls
+out "Hop!"  Oh yes:  I know all about these wonderful schools that you
+cannot keep children or even adults out of, and these teachers whom
+their pupils not only obey without coercion, but adore.  And if you
+will tell me roughly how many Masons and Montessoris and Dalcrozes you
+think you can pick up in Europe for salaries of from thirty shillings
+to five pounds a week, I will estimate your chances of converting your
+millions of little scholastic hells into little scholastic heavens.
+If you are a distressed gentlewoman starting to make a living, you can
+still open a little school; and you can easily buy a secondhand brass
+plate inscribed PESTALOZZIAN INSTITUTE and nail it to your door,
+though you have no more idea of who Pestalozzi was and what he
+advocated or how he did it than the manager of a hotel which began as
+a Hydropathic has of the water cure.  Or you can buy a cheaper plate
+inscribed KINDERGARTEN, and imagine, or leave others to imagine, that
+Froebel is the governing genius of your little _creche_.  No doubt the
+new brass plates are being inscribed Montessori Institute, and will be
+used when the Dotteressa is no longer with us by all the Mrs Pipchins
+and Mrs Wilfers throughout this unhappy land.
+
+I will go further, and admit that the brass plates may not all be
+frauds.  I will tell you that one of my friends was led to genuine
+love and considerable knowledge of classical literature by an Irish
+schoolmaster whom you would call a hedge schoolmaster (he would not be
+allowed to teach anything now) and that it took four years of Harrow
+to obliterate that knowledge and change the love into loathing.
+Another friend of mine who keeps a school in the suburbs, and who
+deeply deplores my "prejudice against schoolmasters," has offered to
+accept my challenge to tell his pupils that they are as free to get up
+and go out of the school at any moment as their parents are to get up
+and go out of a theatre where my plays are being performed.  Even
+among my own schoolmasters I can recollect a few whose classes
+interested me, and whom I should certainly have pestered for
+information and instruction if I could have got into any decent human
+relationship with them, and if they had not been compelled by their
+position to defend themselves as carefully against such advances as
+against furtive attempts to hurt them accidentally in the football
+field or smash their hats with a clod from behind a wall.  But these
+rare cases actually do more harm than good; for they encourage us to
+pretend that all schoolmasters are like that.  Of what use is it to us
+that there are always somewhere two or three teachers of children
+whose specific genius for their occupation triumphs over our tyrannous
+system and even finds in it its opportunity?  For that matter, it is
+possible, if difficult, to find a solicitor, or even a judge, who has
+some notion of what law means, a doctor with a glimmering of science,
+an officer who understands duty and discipline, and a clergyman with
+an inkling of religion, though there are nothing like enough of them
+to go round.  But even the few who, like Ibsen's Mrs Solness, have "a
+genius for nursing the souls of little children" are like angels
+forced to work in prisons instead of in heaven; and even at that they
+are mostly underpaid and despised.  That friend of mine who went from
+the hedge schoolmaster to Harrow once saw a schoolmaster rush from an
+elementary school in pursuit of a boy and strike him.  My friend, not
+considering that the unfortunate man was probably goaded beyond
+endurance, smote the schoolmaster and blackened his eye.  The
+schoolmaster appealed to the law; and my friend found himself waiting
+nervously in the Hammersmith Police Court to answer for his breach of
+the peace.  In his anxiety he asked a police officer what would happen
+to him.  "What did you do?" said the officer.  "I gave a man a black
+eye" said my friend.  "Six pounds if he was a gentleman:  two pounds
+if he wasnt," said the constable.  "He was a schoolmaster" said my
+friend.  "Two pounds" said the officer; and two pounds it was.  The
+blood money was paid cheerfully; and I have ever since advised
+elementary schoolmasters to qualify themselves in the art of
+self-defence, as the British Constitution expresses our national
+estimate of them by allowing us to blacken three of their eyes for the
+same price as one of an ordinary professional man.  How many Froebels
+and Pestalozzis and Miss Masons and Doctoress Montessoris would you be
+likely to get on these terms even if they occurred much more
+frequently in nature than they actually do?
+
+No:  I cannot be put off by the news that our system would be perfect
+if it were worked by angels.  I do not admit it even at that, just as
+I do not admit that if the sky fell we should all catch larks.  But I
+do not propose to bother about a supply of specific genius which does
+not exist, and which, if it did exist, could operate only by at once
+recognizing and establishing the rights of children.
+
+
+
+What We Do Not Teach, and Why
+
+To my mind, a glance at the subjects now taught in schools ought to
+convince any reasonable person that the object of the lessons is to
+keep children out of mischief, and not to qualify them for their part
+in life as responsible citizens of a free State.  It is not possible
+to maintain freedom in any State, no matter how perfect its original
+constitution, unless its publicly active citizens know a good deal of
+constitutional history, law, and political science, with its basis of
+economics.  If as much pains had been taken a century ago to make us
+all understand Ricardo's law of rent as to learn our catechisms, the
+face of the world would have been changed for the better.  But for
+that very reason the greatest care is taken to keep such beneficially
+subversive knowledge from us, with the result that in public life we
+are either place-hunters, anarchists, or sheep shepherded by wolves.
+
+But it will be observed that these are highly controversial subjects.
+Now no controversial subject can be taught dogmatically.  He who knows
+only the official side of a controversy knows less than nothing of its
+nature.  The abler a schoolmaster is, the more dangerous he is to his
+pupils unless they have the fullest opportunity of hearing another
+equally able person do his utmost to shake his authority and convict
+him of error.
+
+At present such teaching is very unpopular.  It does not exist in
+schools; but every adult who derives his knowledge of public affairs
+from the newspapers can take in, at the cost of an extra halfpenny,
+two papers of opposite politics.  Yet the ordinary man so dislikes
+having his mind unsettled, as he calls it, that he angrily refuses to
+allow a paper which dissents from his views to be brought into his
+house.  Even at his club he resents seeing it, and excludes it if it
+happens to run counter to the opinions of all the members.  The result
+is that his opinions are not worth considering.  A churchman who never
+reads The Freethinker very soon has no more real religion than the
+atheist who never reads The Church Times.  The attitude is the same in
+both cases:  they want to hear nothing good of their enemies;
+consequently they remain enemies and suffer from bad blood all their
+lives; whereas men who know their opponents and understand their case,
+quite commonly respect and like them, and always learn something from
+them.
+
+Here, again, as at so many points, we come up against the abuse of
+schools to keep people in ignorance and error, so that they may be
+incapable of successful revolt against their industrial slavery.  The
+most important simple fundamental economic truth to impress on a child
+in complicated civilizations like ours is the truth that whoever
+consumes goods or services without producing by personal effort the
+equivalent of what he or she consumes, inflicts on the community
+precisely the same injury that a thief produces, and would, in any
+honest State, be treated as a thief, however full his or her pockets
+might be of money made by other people.  The nation that first teaches
+its children that truth, instead of flogging them if they discover it
+for themselves, may have to fight all the slaves of all the other
+nations to begin with; but it will beat them as easily as an
+unburdened man with his hands free and with all his energies in full
+play can beat an invalid who has to carry another invalid on his back.
+
+This, however, is not an evil produced by the denial of children's
+rights, nor is it inherent in the nature of schools.  I mention it
+only because it would be folly to call for a reform of our schools
+without taking account of the corrupt resistance which awaits the
+reformer.
+
+A word must also be said about the opposition to reform of the vested
+interest of the classical and coercive schoolmaster.  He, poor wretch,
+has no other means of livelihood; and reform would leave him as a
+workman is now left when he is superseded by a machine.  He had
+therefore better do what he can to get the workman compensated, so as
+to make the public familiar with the idea of compensation before his
+own turn comes.
+
+
+
+Taboo in Schools
+
+The suppression of economic knowledge, disastrous as it is, is quite
+intelligible, its corrupt motive being as clear as the motive of a
+burglar for concealing his jemmy from a policeman.  But the other
+great suppression in our schools, the suppression of the subject of
+sex, is a case of taboo.  In mankind, the lower the type, and the less
+cultivated the mind, the less courage there is to face important
+subjects objectively.  The ablest and most highly cultivated people
+continually discuss religion, politics, and sex:  it is hardly an
+exaggeration to say that they discuss nothing else with fully-awakened
+interest.  Commoner and less cultivated people, even when they form
+societies for discussion, make a rule that politics and religion are
+not to be mentioned, and take it for granted that no decent person
+would attempt to discuss sex.  The three subjects are feared because
+they rouse the crude passions which call for furious gratification in
+murder and rapine at worst, and, at best, lead to quarrels and
+undesirable states of consciousness.
+
+Even when this excuse of bad manners, ill temper, and brutishness (for
+that is what it comes to) compels us to accept it from those adults
+among whom political and theological discussion does as a matter of
+fact lead to the drawing of knives and pistols, and sex discussion
+leads to obscenity, it has no application to children except as an
+imperative reason for training them to respect other people's
+opinions, and to insist on respect for their own in these as in other
+important matters which are equally dangerous:  for example, money.
+And in any case there are decisive reasons; superior, like the reasons
+for suspending conventional reticences between doctor and patient, to
+all considerations of mere decorum, for giving proper instruction in
+the facts of sex.  Those who object to it (not counting coarse people
+who thoughtlessly seize every opportunity of affecting and parading a
+fictitious delicacy) are, in effect, advocating ignorance as a
+safeguard against precocity.  If ignorance were practicable there
+would be something to be said for it up to the age at which ignorance
+is a danger instead of a safeguard.  Even as it is, it seems
+undesirable that any special emphasis should be given to the subject,
+whether by way of delicacy and poetry or too impressive warning.  But
+the plain fact is that in refusing to allow the child to be taught by
+qualified unrelated elders (the parents shrink from the lesson, even
+when they are otherwise qualified, because their own relation to the
+child makes the subject impossible between them) we are virtually
+arranging to have our children taught by other children in guilty
+secrets and unclean jests.  And that settles the question for all
+sensible people.
+
+The dogmatic objection, the sheer instinctive taboo which rules the
+subject out altogether as indecent, has no age limit.  It means that
+at no matter what age a woman consents to a proposal of marriage, she
+should do so in ignorance of the relation she is undertaking.  When
+this actually happens (and apparently it does happen oftener than
+would seem possible) a horrible fraud is being practiced on both the
+man and the woman.  He is led to believe that she knows what she is
+promising, and that he is in no danger of finding himself bound to a
+woman to whom he is eugenically antipathetic.  She contemplates
+nothing but such affectionate relations as may exist between her and
+her nearest kinsmen, and has no knowledge of the condition which, if
+not foreseen, must come as an amazing revelation and a dangerous
+shock, ending possibly in the discovery that the marriage has been an
+irreparable mistake.  Nothing can justify such a risk.  There may be
+people incapable of understanding that the right to know all there is
+to know about oneself is a natural human right that sweeps away all
+the pretences of others to tamper with one's consciousness in order to
+produce what they choose to consider a good character.  But they must
+here bow to the plain mischievousness of entrapping people into
+contracts on which the happiness of their whole lives depends without
+letting them know what they are undertaking.
+
+
+
+Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools
+
+There is just one more nuisance to be disposed of before I come to the
+positive side of my case.  I mean the person who tells me that my
+schooldays belong to a bygone order of educational ideas and
+institutions, and that schools are not now a bit like my old school.
+I reply, with Sir Walter Raleigh, by calling on my soul to give this
+statement the lie.  Some years ago I lectured in Oxford on the subject
+of Education.  A friend to whom I mentioned my intention said, "You
+know nothing of modern education:  schools are not now what they were
+when you were a boy."  I immediately procured the time sheets of half
+a dozen modern schools, and found, as I expected, that they might all
+have been my old school:  there was no real difference.  I may
+mention, too, that I have visited modern schools, and observed that
+there is a tendency to hang printed pictures in an untidy and soulless
+manner on the walls, and occasionally to display on the mantel-shelf a
+deplorable glass case containing certain objects which might possibly,
+if placed in the hands of the pupils, give them some practical
+experience of the weight of a pound and the length of an inch.  And
+sometimes a scoundrel who has rifled a bird's nest or killed a
+harmless snake encourages the children to go and do likewise by
+putting his victims into an imitation nest and bottle and exhibiting
+them as aids to "Nature study."  A suggestion that Nature is worth
+study would certainly have staggered my schoolmasters; so perhaps I
+may admit a gleam of progress here.  But as any child who attempted to
+handle these dusty objects would probably be caned, I do not attach
+any importance to such modernities in school furniture.  The school
+remains what it was in my boyhood, because its real object remains
+what it was.  And that object, I repeat, is to keep the children out
+of mischief:  mischief meaning for the most part worrying the
+grown-ups.
+
+
+
+What is to be Done?
+
+The practical question, then, is what to do with the children.
+Tolerate them at home we will not.  Let them run loose in the streets
+we dare not until our streets become safe places for children, which,
+to our utter shame, they are not at present, though they can hardly be
+worse than some homes and some schools.
+
+The grotesque difficulty of making even a beginning was brought home
+to me in the little village in Hertfordshire where I write these lines
+by the lady of the manor, who asked me very properly what I was going
+to do for the village school.  I did not know what to reply.  As the
+school kept the children quiet during my working hours, I did not for
+the sake of my own personal convenmence want to blow it up with
+dynamite as I should like to blow up most schools.  So I asked for
+guidance.  "You ought to give a prize," said the lady.  I asked if
+there was a prize for good conduct.  As I expected, there was:  one
+for the best-behaved boy and another for the best-behaved girl.  On
+reflection I offered a handsome prize for the worst-behaved boy and
+girl on condition that a record should be kept of their subsequent
+careers and compared with the records of the best-behaved, in order to
+ascertain whether the school criterion of good conduct was valid out
+of school.  My offer was refused because it would not have had the
+effect of encouraging the children to give as little trouble as
+possible, which is of course the real object of all conduct prizes in
+schools.
+
+I must not pretend, then, that I have a system ready to replace all
+the other systems.  Obstructing the way of the proper organization of
+childhood, as of everything else, lies our ridiculous misdistribution
+of the national income, with its accompanying class distinctions and
+imposition of snobbery on children as a necessary part of their social
+training.  The result of our economic folly is that we are a nation of
+undesirable acquaintances; and the first object of all our
+institutions for children is segregation.  If, for example, our
+children were set free to roam and play about as they pleased, they
+would have to be policed; and the first duty of the police in a State
+like ours would be to see that every child wore a badge indicating its
+class in society, and that every child seen speaking to another child
+with a lower-class badge, or any child wearing a higher badge than
+that allotted to it by, say, the College of Heralds, should
+immediately be skinned alive with a birch rod.  It might even be
+insisted that girls with high-class badges should be attended by
+footmen, grooms, or even military escorts.  In short, there is hardly
+any limit to the follies with which our Commercialism would infect any
+system that it would tolerate at all.  But something like a change of
+heart is still possible; and since all the evils of snobbery and
+segregation are rampant in our schools at present we may as well make
+the best as the worst of them.
+
+
+
+Children's Rights and Duties
+
+Now let us ask what are a child's rights, and what are the rights of
+society over the child.  Its rights, being clearly those of any other
+human being, are summed up in the right to live:  that is, to have all
+the conclusive arguments that prove that it would be better dead, that
+it is a child of wrath, that the population is already excessive, that
+the pains of life are greater than its pleasures, that its sacrifice
+in a hospital or laboratory experiment might save millions of lives,
+etc. etc. etc., put out of the question, and its existence accepted as
+necessary and sacred, all theories to the contrary notwithstanding,
+whether by Calvin or Schopenhauer or Pasteur or the nearest person
+with a taste for infanticide.  And this right to live includes, and in
+fact is, the right to be what the child likes and can, to do what it
+likes and can, to make what it likes and can, to think what it likes
+and can, to smash what it dislikes and can, and generally to behave in
+an altogether unaccountable manner within the limits imposed by the
+similar rights of its neighbors.  And the rights of society over it
+clearly extend to requiring it to qualify itself to live in society
+without wasting other peoples time:  that is, it must know the rules
+of the road, be able to read placards and proclamations, fill voting
+papers, compose and send letters and telegrams, purchase food and
+clothing and railway tickets for itself, count money and give and take
+change, and, generally, know how many beans made five.  It must know
+some law, were it only a simple set of commandments, some political
+economy, agriculture enough to shut the gates of fields with cattle in
+them and not to trample on growing crops, sanitation enough not to
+defile its haunts, and religion enough to have some idea of why it is
+allowed its rights and why it must respect the rights of others.  And
+the rest of its education must consist of anything else it can pick
+up; for beyond this society cannot go with any certainty, and indeed
+can only go this far rather apologetically and provisionally, as doing
+the best it can on very uncertain ground.
+
+
+
+Should Children Earn their Living?
+
+Now comes the question how far children should be asked to contribute
+to the support of the community.  In approaching it we must put aside
+the considerations that now induce all humane and thoughtful political
+students to agitate for the uncompromising abolition of child labor
+under our capitalist system.  It is not the least of the curses of
+that system that it will bequeath to future generations a mass of
+legislation to prevent capitalists from "using up nine generations of
+men in one generation," as they began by doing until they were
+restrained by law at the suggestion of Robert Owen, the founder of
+English Socialism.  Most of this legislation will become an
+insufferable restraint upon freedom and variety of action when
+Capitalism goes the way of Druidic human sacrifice (a much less
+slaughterous institution).  There is every reason why a child should
+not be allowed to work for commercial profit or for the support of its
+parents at the expense of its own future; but there is no reason
+whatever why a child should not do some work for its own sake and that
+of the community if it can be shewn that both it and the community
+will be the better for it.
+
+
+
+Children's Happiness
+
+Also it is important to put the happiness of the children rather
+carefully in its place, which is really not a front place.  The
+unsympathetic, selfish, hard people who regard happiness as a very
+exceptional indulgence to which children are by no means entitled,
+though they may be allowed a very little of it on their birthdays or
+at Christmas, are sometimes better parents in effect than those who
+imagine that children are as capable of happiness as adults.  Adults
+habitually exaggerate their own capacity in that direction grossly;
+yet most adults can stand an allowance of happiness that would be
+quite thrown away on children.  The secret of being miserable is to
+have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.  The cure
+for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the
+pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and
+active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of
+it.  That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be
+tired.  Music after dinner is pleasant:  music before breakfast is so
+unpleasant as to be clearly unnatural.  To people who are not
+overworked holidays are a nuisance.  To people who are, and who can
+afford them, they are a troublesome necessity.  A perpetual holiday is
+a good working definition of hell.
+
+
+
+The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday
+
+It will be said here that, on the contrary, heaven is always conceived
+as a perpetual holiday, and that whoever is not born to an independent
+income is striving for one or longing for one because it gives
+holidays for life.  To which I reply, first, that heaven, as
+conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so
+miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in
+heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside;
+and that the genuine popular verdict on it is expressed in the proverb
+"Heaven for holiness and Hell for company."  Second, I point out that
+the wretched people who have independent incomes and no useful
+occupation, do the most amazingly disagreeable and dangerous things to
+make themselves tired and hungry in the evening.  When they are not
+involved in what they call sport, they are doing aimlessly what other
+people have to be paid to do:  driving horses and motor cars; trying
+on dresses and walking up and down to shew them off; and acting as
+footmen and housemaids to royal personages.  The sole and obvious
+cause of the notion that idleness is delightful and that heaven is a
+place where there is nothing to be done, is our school system and our
+industrial system.  The school is a prison in which work is a
+punishment and a curse.  In avowed prisons, hard labor, the only
+alleviation of a prisoner's lot, is treated as an aggravation of his
+punishment; and everything possible is done to intensify the
+prisoner's inculcated and unnatural notion that work is an evil.  In
+industry we are overworked and underfed prisoners.  Under such absurd
+circumstances our judgment of things becomes as perverted as our
+habits.  If we were habitually underworked and overfed, our notion of
+heaven would be a place where everybody worked strenuously for
+twenty-four hours a day and never got anything to eat.
+
+Once realize that a perpetual holiday is beyond human endurance, and
+that "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" and it
+will be seen that we have no right to impose a perpetual holiday on
+children.  If we did, they would soon outdo the Labor Party in their
+claim for a Right to Work Bill.
+
+In any case no child should be brought up to suppose that its food and
+clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty
+space by papa.  Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the
+idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable
+obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and
+inculcate the repayment as a point of honor.  If we did that
+today--and nothing but flat dishonesty prevents us from doing it--we
+should have no idle rich and indeed probably no rich, since there is
+no distinction in being rich if you have to pay scot and lot in
+personal effort like the working folk.  Therefore, if for only half an
+hour a day, a child should do something serviceable to the community.
+
+Productive work for children has the advantage that its discipline is
+the discipline of impersonal necessity, not that of wanton personal
+coercion.  The eagerness of children in our industrial districts to
+escape from school to the factory is not caused by lighter tasks or
+shorter hours in the factory, nor altogether by the temptation of
+wages, nor even by the desire for novelty, but by the dignity of adult
+work, the exchange of the factitious personal tyranny of the
+schoolmaster, from which the grown-ups are free, for the stern but
+entirely dignified Laws of Life to which all flesh is subject.
+
+
+
+University Schoolboyishness
+
+Older children might do a good deal before beginning their collegiate
+education.  What is the matter with our universities is that all the
+students are schoolboys, whereas it is of the very essence of
+university education that they should be men.  The function of a
+university is not to teach things that can now be taught as well or
+better by University Extension lectures or by private tutors or modern
+correspondence classes with gramophones.  We go to them to be
+socialized; to acquire the hall mark of communal training; to become
+citizens of the world instead of inmates of the enlarged rabbit
+hutches we call homes; to learn manners and become unchallengeable
+ladies and gentlemen.  The social pressure which effects these changes
+should be that of persons who have faced the full responsibilities of
+adults as working members of the general community, not that of a
+barbarous rabble of half emancipated schoolboys and unemancipable
+pedants.  It is true that in a reasonable state of society this
+outside experience would do for us very completely what the university
+does now so corruptly that we tolerate its bad manners only because
+they are better than no manners at all.  But the university will
+always exist in some form as a community of persons desirous of
+pushing their culture to the highest pitch they are capable of, not as
+solitary students reading in seclusion, but as members of a body of
+individuals all pursuing culture, talking culture, thinking culture,
+above all, criticizing culture.  If such persons are to read and talk
+and criticize to any purpose, they must know the world outside the
+university at least as well as the shopkeeper in the High Street does.
+And this is just what they do not know at present.  You may say of
+them, paraphrasing Mr. Kipling, "What do they know of Plato that only
+Plato know?"  If our universities would exclude everybody who had not
+earned a living by his or her own exertions for at least a couple of
+years, their effect would be vastly improved.
+
+
+
+The New Laziness
+
+The child of the future, then, if there is to be any future but one of
+decay, will work more or less for its living from an early age; and in
+doing so it will not shock anyone, provided there be no longer any
+reason to associate the conception of children working for their
+living with infants toiling in a factory for ten hours a day or boys
+drudging from nine to six under gas lamps in underground city offices.
+Lads and lasses in their teens will probably be able to produce as
+much as the most expensive person now costs in his own person (it is
+retinue that eats up the big income) without working too hard or too
+long for quite as much happiness as they can enjoy.  The question to
+be balanced then will be, not how soon people should be put to work,
+but how soon they should be released from any obligation of the kind.
+A life's work is like a day's work:  it can begin early and leave off
+early or begin late and leave off late, or, as with us, begin too
+early and never leave off at all, obviously the worst of all possible
+plans.  In any event we must finally reckon work, not as the curse our
+schools and prisons and capitalist profit factories make it seem
+today, but as a prime necessity of a tolerable existence.  And if we
+cannot devise fresh wants as fast as we develop the means of supplying
+them, there will come a scarcity of the needed, cut-and-dried,
+appointed work that is always ready to everybody's hand.  It may have
+to be shared out among people all of whom want more of it.  And then a
+new sort of laziness will become the bugbear of society:  the laziness
+that refuses to face the mental toil and adventure of making work by
+inventing new ideas or extending the domain of knowledge, and insists
+on a ready-made routine.  It may come to forcing people to retire
+before they are willing to make way for younger ones:  that is, to
+driving all persons of a certain age out of industry, leaving them to
+find something experimental to occupy them on pain of perpetual
+holiday.  Men will then try to spend twenty thousand a year for the
+sake of having to earn it.  Instead of being what we are now, the
+cheapest and nastiest of the animals, we shall be the costliest, most
+fastidious, and best bred.  In short, there is no end to the
+astonishing things that may happen when the curse of Adam becomes
+first a blessing and then an incurable habit.  And in that day we must
+not grudge children their share of it.
+
+
+
+The Infinite School Task
+
+The question of children's work, however, is only a question of what
+the child ought to do for the community.  How highly it should qualify
+itself is another matter.  But most of the difficulty of inducing
+children to learn would disappear if our demands became not only
+definite but finite.  When learning is only an excuse for
+imprisonment, it is an instrument of torture which becomes more
+painful the more progress is made.  Thus when you have forced a child
+to learn the Church Catechism, a document profound beyond the
+comprehension of most adults, you are sometimes at a standstill for
+something else to teach; and you therefore keep the wretched child
+repeating its catechism again and again until you hit on the plan of
+making it learn instalments of Bible verses, preferably from the book
+of Numbers.  But as it is less trouble to set a lesson that you know
+yourself, there is a tendency to keep repeating the already learnt
+lesson rather than break new ground.  At school I began with a fairly
+complete knowledge of Latin grammar in the childish sense of being
+able to repeat all the paradigms; and I was kept at this, or rather
+kept in a class where the master never asked me to do it because he
+knew I could, and therefore devoted himself to trapping the boys who
+could not, until I finally forgot most of it.  But when progress took
+place, what did it mean?  First it meant Caesar, with the
+foreknowledge that to master Caesar meant only being set at Virgil,
+with the culminating horror of Greek and Homer in reserve at the end
+of that.  I preferred Caesar, because his statement that Gaul is
+divided into three parts, though neither interesting nor true, was the
+only Latin sentence I could translate at sight:  therefore the longer
+we stuck at Caesar the better I was pleased.  Just so do less
+classically educated children see nothing in the mastery of addition
+but the beginning of subtraction, and so on through multiplication and
+division and fractions, with the black cloud of algebra on the
+horizon.  And if a boy rushes through all that, there is always the
+calculus to fall back on, unless indeed you insist on his learning
+music, and proceed to hit him if he cannot tell you the year Beethoven
+was born.
+
+A child has a right to finality as regards its compulsory lessons.
+Also as regards physical training.  At present it is assumed that the
+schoolmaster has a right to force every child into an attempt to
+become Porson and Bentley, Leibnitz and Newton, all rolled into one.
+This is the tradition of the oldest grammar schools.  In our times an
+even more horrible and cynical claim has been made for the right to
+drive boys through compulsory games in the playing fields until they
+are too much exhausted physically to do anything but drop off to
+sleep.  This is supposed to protect them from vice; but as it also
+protects them from poetry, literature, music, meditation and prayer,
+it may be dismissed with the obvious remark that if boarding schools
+are places whose keepers are driven to such monstrous measures lest
+more abominable things should happen, then the sooner boarding schools
+are violently abolished the better.  It is true that society may make
+physical claims on the child as well as mental ones:  the child must
+learn to walk, to use a knife and fork, to swim, to ride a bicycle, to
+acquire sufficient power of self-defence to make an attack on it an
+arduous and uncertain enterprise, perhaps to fly.  What as a matter of
+common-sense it clearly has not a right to do is to make this an
+excuse for keeping the child slaving for ten hours at physical
+exercises on the ground that it is not yet as dexterous as Cinquevalli
+and as strong as Sandow.
+
+
+
+The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge
+
+In a word, we have no right to insist on educating a child; for its
+education can end only with its life and will not even then be
+complete.  Compulsory completion of education is the last folly of a
+rotten and desperate civilization.  It is the rattle in its throat
+before dissolution.  All we can fairly do is to prescribe certain
+definite acquirements and accomplishments as qualifications for
+certain employments; and to secure them, not by the ridiculous method
+of inflicting injuries on the persons who have not yet mastered them,
+but by attaching certain privileges (not pecuniary) to the
+employments.
+
+Most acquirements carry their own privileges with them.  Thus a baby
+has to be pretty closely guarded and imprisoned because it cannot take
+care of itself.  It has even to be carried about (the most complete
+conceivable infringement of its liberty) until it can walk.  But
+nobody goes on carrying children after they can walk lest they should
+walk into mischief, though Arab boys make their sisters carry them, as
+our own spoiled children sometimes make their nurses, out of mere
+laziness, because sisters in the East and nurses in the West are kept
+in servitude.  But in a society of equals (the only reasonable and
+permanently possible sort of society) children are in much greater
+danger of acquiring bandy legs through being left to walk before they
+are strong enough than of being carried when they are well able to
+walk.  Anyhow, freedom of movement in a nursery is the reward of
+learning to walk; and in precisely the same way freedom of movement in
+a city is the reward of learning how to read public notices, and to
+count and use money.  The consequences are of course much larger than
+the mere ability to read the name of a street or the number of a
+railway platform and the destination of a train.  When you enable a
+child to read these, you also enable it to read this preface, to the
+utter destruction, you may quite possibly think, of its morals and
+docility.  You also expose it to the danger of being run over by
+taxicabs and trains.  The moral and physical risks of education are
+enormous:  every new power a child acquires, from speaking, walking,
+and co-ordinating its vision, to conquering continents and founding
+religions, opens up immense new possibilities of mischief.  Teach a
+child to write and you teach it how to forge:  teach it to speak and
+you teach it how to lie:  teach it to walk and you teach it how to
+kick its mother to death.
+
+The great problem of slavery for those whose aim is to maintain it is
+the problem of reconciling the efficiency of the slave with the
+helplessness that keeps him in servitude; and this problem is
+fortunately not completely soluble; for it is not in fact found
+possible for a duke to treat his solicitor or his doctor as he treats
+his laborers, though they are all equally his slaves:  the laborer
+being in fact less dependent on his favor than the professional man.
+Hence it is that men come to resent, of all things, protection,
+because it so often means restriction of their liberty lest they
+should make a bad use of it.  If there are dangerous precipices about,
+it is much easier and cheaper to forbid people to walk near the edge
+than to put up an effective fence:  that is why both legislators and
+parents and the paid deputies of parents are always inhibiting and
+prohibiting and punishing and scolding and laming and cramping and
+delaying progress and growth instead of making the dangerous places as
+safe as possible and then boldly taking and allowing others to take
+the irreducible minimum of risk.
+
+
+
+English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual Cowardice
+
+It is easier to convert most people to the need for allowing their
+children to run physical risks than moral ones.  I can remember a
+relative of mine who, when I was a small child, unused to horses and
+very much afraid of them, insisted on putting me on a rather
+rumbustious pony with little spurs on my heels (knowing that in my
+agitation I would use them unconsciously), and being enormously amused
+at my terrors.  Yet when that same lady discovered that I had found a
+copy of The Arabian Nights and was devouring it with avidity, she was
+horrified, and hid it away from me lest it should break my soul as the
+pony might have broken my neck.  This way of producing hardy bodies
+and timid souls is so common in country houses that you may spend
+hours in them listening to stories of broken collar bones, broken
+backs, and broken necks without coming upon a single spiritual
+adventure or daring thought.
+
+But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or
+physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them.  A man
+who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a
+heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at
+the age of 21 years but of 21 seconds.
+
+
+
+The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness
+
+The difficulty with children is that they need protection from risks
+they are too young to understand, and attacks they can neither avoid
+nor resist.  You may on academic grounds allow a child to snatch
+glowing coals from the fire once.  You will not do it twice.  The
+risks of liberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance
+and self-helplessness are another matter.  Not only children but
+adults need protection from them.  At present adults are often exposed
+to risks outside their knowledge or beyond their comprehension or
+powers of resistance or foresight:  for example, we have to look on
+every day at marriages or financial speculations that may involve far
+worse consequences than burnt fingers.  And just as it is part of the
+business of adults to protect children, to feed them, clothe them,
+shelter them, and shift for them in all sorts of ways until they are
+able to shift for themselves, it is coming more and more to be seen
+that this is true not only of the relation between adults and
+children, but between adults and adults.  We shall not always look on
+indifferently at foolish marriages and financial speculations, nor
+allow dead men to control live communities by ridiculous wills and
+living heirs to squander and ruin great estates, nor tolerate a
+hundred other absurd liberties that we allow today because we are too
+lazy to find out the proper way to interfere.  But the interference
+must be regulated by some theory of the individual's rights.  Though
+the right to live is absolute, it is not unconditional.  If a man is
+unbearably mischievous, he must be killed.  This is a mere matter of
+necessity, like the killing of a man-eating tiger in a nursery, a
+venomous snake in the garden, or a fox in the poultry yard.  No
+society could be constructed on the assumption that such extermination
+is a violation of the creature's right to live, and therefore must not
+be allowed.  And then at once arises the danger into which morality
+has led us:  the danger of persecution.  One Christian spreading his
+doctrines may seem more mischievous than a dozen thieves:  throw him
+therefore to the lions.  A lying or disobedient child may corrupt a
+whole generation and make human Society impossible:  therefore thrash
+the vice out of him.  And so on until our whole system of abortion,
+intimidation, tyranny, cruelty and the rest is in full swing again.
+
+
+
+The Common Sense of Toleration
+
+The real safeguard against this is the dogma of Toleration.  I need
+not here repeat the compact treatise on it which I prepared for the
+Joint Committee on the Censorship of Stage Plays, and prefixed to The
+Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet.  It must suffice now to say that the
+present must not attempt to schoolmaster the future by pretending to
+know good from evil in tendency, or protect citizens against shocks to
+their opinions and convictions, moral, political or religious:  in
+other words it must not persecute doctrines of any kind, or what is
+called bad taste, and must insist on all persons facing such shocks as
+they face frosty weather or any of the other disagreeable, dangerous,
+or bracing incidents of freedom.  The expediency of Toleration has
+been forced on us by the fact that progressive enlightenment depends
+on a fair hearing for doctrines which at first appear seditious,
+blasphemous, and immoral, and which deeply shock people who never
+think originally, thought being with them merely a habit and an echo.
+The deeper ground for Toleration is the nature of creation, which, as
+we now know, proceeds by evolution.  Evolution finds its way by
+experiment; and this finding of the way varies according to the stage
+of development reached, from the blindest groping along the line of
+least resistance to intellectual speculation, with its practical
+sequel of hypothesis and experimental verification; or to observation,
+induction, and deduction; or even into so rapid and intuitive an
+integration of all these processes in a single brain that we get the
+inspired guess of the man of genius and the desperate resolution of
+the teacher of new truths who is first slain as a blasphemous apostate
+and then worshipped as a prophet.
+
+Here the law for the child is the same as for the adult.  The high
+priest must not rend his garments and cry "Crucify him" when he is
+shocked:  the atheist must not clamor for the suppression of Law's
+Serious Call because it has for two centuries destroyed the natural
+happiness of innumerable unfortunate children by persuading their
+parents that it is their religious duty to be miserable.  It, and the
+Sermon on the Mount, and Machiavelli's Prince, and La Rochefoucauld's
+maxims, and Hymns Ancient and Modern, and De Glanville's apologue, and
+Dr. Watts's rhymes, and Nietzsche's Gay Science, and Ingersoll's
+Mistakes of Moses, and the speeches and pamphlets of the people who
+want us to make war on Germany, and the Noodle's Orations and articles
+of our politicians and journalists, must all be tolerated not only
+because any of them may for all we know be on the right track but
+because it is in the conflict of opinion that we win knowledge and
+wisdom.  However terrible the wounds suffered in that conflict, they
+are better than the barren peace of death that follows when all the
+combatants are slaughtered or bound hand and foot.
+
+The difficulty at present is that though this necessity for Toleration
+is a law of political science as well established as the law of
+gravitation, our rulers are never taught political science:  on the
+contrary, they are taught in school that the master tolerates nothing
+that is disagreeable to him; that ruling is simply being master; and
+that the master's method is the method of violent punishment.  And our
+citizens, all school taught, are walking in the same darkness.  As I
+write these lines the Home Secretary is explaining that a man who has
+been imprisoned for blasphemy must not be released because his remarks
+were painful to the feelings of his pious fellow townsmen.  Now it
+happens that this very Home Secretary has driven many thousands of his
+fellow citizens almost beside themselves by the crudity of his notions
+of government, and his simple inability to understand why he should
+not use and make laws to torment and subdue people who do not happen
+to agree with him.  In a word, he is not a politician, but a grown-up
+schoolboy who has at last got a cane in his hand.  And as all the rest
+of us are in the same condition (except as to command of the cane) the
+only objection made to his proceedings takes the shape of clamorous
+demands that _he_ should be caned instead of being allowed to cane
+other people.
+
+
+
+The Sin of Athanasius
+
+It seems hopeless.  Anarchists are tempted to preach a violent and
+implacable resistance to all law as the only remedy; and the result of
+that speedily is that people welcome any tyranny that will rescue them
+from chaos.  But there is really no need to choose between anarchy and
+tyranny.  A quite reasonable state of things is practicable if we
+proceed on human assumptions and not on academic ones.  If adults will
+frankly give up their claim to know better than children what the
+purposes of the Life Force are, and treat the child as an experiment
+like themselves, and possibly a more successful one, and at the same
+time relinquish their monstrous parental claims to personal private
+property in children, the rest must be left to common sense.  It is
+our attitude, our religion, that is wrong.  A good beginning might be
+made by enacting that any person dictating a piece of conduct to a
+child or to anyone else as the will of God, or as absolutely right,
+should be dealt with as a blasphemer:  as, indeed, guilty of the
+unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost.  If the penalty were death,
+it would rid us at once of that scourge of humanity, the amateur Pope.
+As an Irish Protestant, I raise the cry of No Popery with hereditary
+zest.  We are overrun with Popes.  From curates and governesses, who
+may claim a sort of professional standing, to parents and uncles and
+nurserymaids and school teachers and wiseacres generally, there are
+scores of thousands of human insects groping through our darkness by
+the feeble phosphorescence of their own tails, yet ready at a moment's
+notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject; to explain
+how and why the universe was made (in my youth they added the exact
+date) and the circumstances under which it will cease to exist; to lay
+down precise rules of right and wrong conduct; to discriminate
+infallibly between virtuous and vicious character; and all this with
+such certainty that they are prepared to visit all the rigors of the
+law, and all the ruinous penalties of social ostracism on people,
+however harmless their actions maybe who venture to laugh at their
+monstrous conceit or to pay their assumptions the extravagant
+compliment of criticizing them.  As to children, who shall say what
+canings and birchings and terrifyings and threats of hell fire and
+impositions and humiliations and petty imprisonings and sendings to
+bed and standing in corners and the like they have suffered because
+their parents and guardians and teachers knew everything so much
+better than Socrates or Solon?
+
+It is this ignorant uppishness that does the mischief.  A stranger on
+the planet might expect that its grotesque absurdity would provoke
+enough ridicule to cure it; but unfortunately quite the contrary
+happens.  Just as our ill health delivers us into the hands of medical
+quacks and creates a passionate demand for impudent pretences that
+doctors can cure the diseases they themselves die of daily, so our
+ignorance and helplessness set us clamoring for spiritual and moral
+quacks who pretend that they can save our souls from their own
+damnation.  If a doctor were to say to his patients, "I am familiar
+with your symptoms, because I have seen other people in your
+condition; and I will bring the very little knowledge we have to your
+treatment; but except in that very shallow sense I dont know what is
+the matter with you; and I cant undertake to cure you," he would be a
+lost man professionally; and if a clergyman, on being called on to
+award a prize for good conduct in the village school, were to say, "I
+am afraid I cannot say who is the best-behaved child, because I really
+do not know what good conduct is; but I will gladly take the teacher's
+word as to which child has caused least inconvenience," he would
+probably be unfrocked, if not excommunicated.  And yet no honest and
+intellectually capable doctor or parson can say more.  Clearly it
+would not be wise of the doctor to say it, because optimistic lies
+have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them
+convincingly has mistaken his profession.  And a clergyman who is not
+prepared to lay down the law dogmatically will not be of much use in a
+village school, though it behoves him all the more to be very careful
+what law he lays down.  But unless both the clergyman and the doctor
+are in the attitude expressed by these speeches they are not fit for
+their work.  The man who believes that he has more than a provisional
+hypothesis to go upon is a born fool.  He may have to act vigorously
+on it.  The world has no use for the Agnostic who wont believe
+anything because anything might be false, and wont deny anything
+because anything might be true.  But there is a wide difference
+between saying, "I believe this; and I am going to act on it," or, "I
+dont believe it; and I wont act on it," and saying, "It is true; and
+it is my duty and yours to act on it," or, "It is false; and it is my
+duty and yours to refuse to act on it."  The difference is as great as
+that between the Apostles' Creed and the Athanasian Creed.  When you
+repeat the Apostles' Creed you affirm that you believe certain things.
+There you are clearly within your rights.  When you repeat the
+Athanasian Creed, you affirm that certain things are so, and that
+anybody who doubts that they are so cannot be saved.  And this is
+simply a piece of impudence on your part, as you know nothing about it
+except that as good men as you have never heard of your creed.  The
+apostolic attitude is a desire to convert others to our beliefs for
+the sake of sympathy and light:  the Athanasian attitude is a desire
+to murder people who dont agree with us.  I am sufficient of an
+Athanasian to advocate a law for the speedy execution of all
+Athanasians, because they violate the fundamental proposition of my
+creed, which is, I repeat, that all living creatures are experiments.
+The precise formula for the Superman, _ci-devant_ The Just Man Made
+Perfect, has not yet been discovered.  Until it is, every birth is an
+experiment in the Great Research which is being conducted by the Life
+Force to discover that formula.
+
+
+
+The Experiment Experimenting
+
+And now all the modern schoolmaster abortionists will rise up beaming,
+and say, "We quite agree.  We regard every child in our school as a
+subject for experiment.  We are always experimenting with them.  We
+challenge the experimental test for our system.  We are continually
+guided by our experience in our great work of moulding the character
+of our future citizens, etc. etc. etc."  I am sorry to seem
+irreconcilable; but it is the Life Force that has to make the
+experiment and not the schoolmaster; and the Life Force for the
+child's purpose is in the child and not in the schoolmaster.  The
+schoolmaster is another experiment; and a laboratory in which all the
+experiments began experimenting on one another would not produce
+intelligible results.  I admit, however, that if my schoolmasters had
+treated me as an experiment of the Life Force:  that is, if they had
+set me free to do as I liked subject only to my political rights and
+theirs, they could not have watched the experiment very long, because
+the first result would have been a rapid movement on my part in the
+direction of the door, and my disappearance there-through.
+
+It may be worth inquiring where I should have gone to.  I should say
+that practically every time I should have gone to a much more
+educational place.  I should have gone into the country, or into the
+sea, or into the National Gallery, or to hear a band if there was one,
+or to any library where there were no schoolbooks.  I should have read
+very dry and difficult books:  for example, though nothing would have
+induced me to read the budget of stupid party lies that served as a
+text-book of history in school, I remember reading Robertson's Charles
+V. and his history of Scotland from end to end most laboriously.
+Once, stung by the airs of a schoolfellow who alleged that he had read
+Locke On The Human Understanding, I attempted to read the Bible
+straight through, and actually got to the Pauline Epistles before I
+broke down in disgust at what seemed to me their inveterate
+crookedness of mind.  If there had been a school where children were
+really free, I should have had to be driven out of it for the sake of
+my health by the teachers; for the children to whom a literary
+education can be of any use are insatiable:  they will read and study
+far more than is good for them.  In fact the real difficulty is to
+prevent them from wasting their time by reading for the sake of
+reading and studying for the sake of studying, instead of taking some
+trouble to find out what they really like and are capable of doing
+some good at.  Some silly person will probably interrupt me here with
+the remark that many children have no appetite for a literary
+education at all, and would never open a book if they were not forced
+to.  I have known many such persons who have been forced to the point
+of obtaining University degrees.  And for all the effect their
+literary exercises has left on them they might just as well have been
+put on the treadmill.  In fact they are actually less literate than
+the treadmill would have left them; for they might by chance have
+picked up and dipped into a volume of Shakespear or a translation of
+Homer if they had not been driven to loathe every famous name in
+literature.  I should probably know as much Latin as French, if Latin
+had not been made the excuse for my school imprisonment and
+degradation.
+
+
+
+Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport
+
+If we are to discuss the importance of art, learning, and intellectual
+culture, the first thing we have to recognize is that we have very
+little of them at present; and that this little has not been produced
+by compulsory education:  nay, that the scarcity is unnatural and has
+been produced by the violent exclusion of art and artists from
+schools.  On the other hand we have quite a considerable degree of
+bodily culture:  indeed there is a continual outcry against the
+sacrifice of mental accomplishments to athletics.  In other words a
+sacrifice of the professed object of compulsory education to the real
+object of voluntary education.  It is assumed that this means that
+people prefer bodily to mental culture; but may it not mean that they
+prefer liberty and satisfaction to coercion and privation.  Why is it
+that people who have been taught Shakespear as a school subject loathe
+his plays and cannot by any means be persuaded ever to open his works
+after they escape from school, whereas there is still, 300 years after
+his death, a wide and steady sale for his works to people who read his
+plays as plays, and not as task work?  If Shakespear, or for that
+matter, Newton and Leibnitz, are allowed to find their readers and
+students they will find them.  If their works are annotated and
+paraphrased by dullards, and the annotations and paraphrases forced on
+all young people by imprisonment and flogging and scolding, there will
+not be a single man of letters or higher mathematician the more in the
+country:  on the contrary there will be less, as so many potential
+lovers of literature and mathematics will have been incurably
+prejudiced against them.  Everyone who is conversant with the class in
+which child imprisonment and compulsory schooling is carried out to
+the final extremity of the university degree knows that its scholastic
+culture is a sham; that it knows little about literature or art and a
+great deal about point-to-point races; and that the village cobbler,
+who has never read a page of Plato, and is admittedly a dangerously
+ignorant man politically, is nevertheless a Socrates compared to the
+classically educated gentlemen who discuss politics in country houses
+at election time (and at no other time) after their day's earnest and
+skilful shooting.  Think of the years and years of weary torment the
+women of the piano-possessing class have been forced to spend over the
+keyboard, fingering scales.  How many of them could be bribed to
+attend a pianoforte recital by a great player, though they will rise
+from sick beds rather than miss Ascot or Goodwood?
+
+Another familiar fact that teaches the same lesson is that many women
+who have voluntarily attained a high degree of culture cannot add up
+their own housekeeping books, though their education in simple
+arithmetic was compulsory, whereas their higher education has been
+wholly voluntary.  Everywhere we find the same result.  The
+imprisonment, the beating, the taming and laming, the breaking of
+young spirits, the arrest of development, the atrophy of all
+inhibitive power except the power of fear, are real:  the education is
+sham.  Those who have been taught most know least.
+
+
+
+Antichrist
+
+Among the worst effects of the unnatural segregation of children in
+schools and the equally unnatural constant association of them with
+adults in the family is the utter defeat of the vital element in
+Christianity.  Christ stands in the world for that intuition of the
+highest humanity that we, being members one of another, must not
+complain, must not scold, must not strike, nor revile nor persecute
+nor revenge nor punish.  Now family life and school life are, as far
+as the moral training of children is concerned, nothing but the
+deliberate inculcation of a routine of complaint, scolding,
+punishment, persecution, and revenge as the natural and only possible
+way of dealing with evil or inconvenience.  "Aint nobody to be whopped
+for this here?" exclaimed Sam Weller when he saw his employer's name
+written up on a stage coach, and conceived the phenomenon as an insult
+which reflected on himself.  This exclamation of Sam Weller is at once
+the negation of Christianity and the beginning and the end of current
+morality; and so it will remain as long as the family and the school
+persist as we know them:  that is, as long as the rights of children
+are so utterly denied that nobody will even take the trouble to
+ascertain what they are, and coming of age is like the turning of a
+convict into the street after twenty-one years penal servitude.
+Indeed it is worse; for the convict may have learnt before his
+conviction how to live in freedom and may remember how to set about
+it, however lamed his powers of freedom may have become through
+disuse; but the child knows no other way of life but the slave's way.
+Born free, as Rousseau says, he has been laid hands on by slaves from
+the moment of his birth and brought up as a slave.  How is he, when he
+is at last set free, to be anything else than the slave he actually
+is, clamoring for war, for the lash, for police, prisons, and
+scaffolds in a wild panic of delusion that without these things he is
+lost.  The grown-up Englishman is to the end of his days a badly
+brought-up child, beyond belief quarrelsome, petulant, selfish,
+destructive, and cowardly:  afraid that the Germans will come and
+enslave him; that the burglar will come and rob him; that the bicycle
+or motor car will run over him; that the smallpox will attack him; and
+that the devil will run away with him and empty him out like a sack of
+coals on a blazing fire unless his nurse or his parents or his
+schoolmaster or his bishop or his judge or his army or his navy will
+do something to frighten these bad things away.  And this Englishman,
+without the moral courage of a louse, will risk his neck for fun fifty
+times every winter in the hunting field, and at Badajos sieges and the
+like will ram his head into a hole bristling with sword blades rather
+than be beaten in the one department in which he has been brought up
+to consult his own honor.  As a Sportsman (and war is fundamentally
+the sport of hunting and fighting the most dangerous of the beasts of
+prey) he feels free.  He will tell you himself that the true sportsman
+is never a snob, a coward, a duffer, a cheat, a thief, or a liar.
+Curious, is it not, that he has not the same confidence in other sorts
+of man?
+
+And even sport is losing its freedom.  Soon everybody will be
+schooled, mentally and physically, from the cradle to the end of the
+term of adult compulsory military service, and finally of compulsory
+civil service lasting until the age of superannuation.  Always more
+schooling, more compulsion.  We are to be cured by an excess of the
+dose that has poisoned us.  Satan is to cast out Satan.
+
+
+
+Under the Whip
+
+Clearly this will not do.  We must reconcile education with liberty.
+We must find out some means of making men workers and, if need be,
+warriors, without making them slaves.  We must cultivate the noble
+virtues that have their root in pride.  Now no schoolmaster will teach
+these any more than a prison governor will teach his prisoners how to
+mutiny and escape.  Self-preservation forces him to break the spirit
+that revolts against him, and to inculcate submission, even to obscene
+assault, as a duty.  A bishop once had the hardihood to say that he
+would rather see England free than England sober.  Nobody has yet
+dared to say that he would rather see an England of ignoramuses than
+an England of cowards and slaves.  And if anyone did, it would be
+necessary to point out that the antithesis is not a practical one, as
+we have got at present an England of ignoramuses who are also cowards
+and slaves, and extremely proud of it at that, because in school they
+are taught to submit, with what they ridiculously call Oriental
+fatalism (as if any Oriental has ever submitted more helplessly and
+sheepishly to robbery and oppression than we Occidentals do), to be
+driven day after day into compounds and set to the tasks they loathe
+by the men they hate and fear, as if this were the inevitable destiny
+of mankind.  And naturally, when they grow up, they helplessly
+exchange the prison of the school for the prison of the mine or the
+workshop or the office, and drudge along stupidly and miserably, with
+just enough gregarious instinct to turn furiously on any intelligent
+person who proposes a change.  It would be quite easy to make England
+a paradise, according to our present ideas, in a few years.  There is
+no mystery about it:  the way has been pointed out over and over
+again.  The difficulty is not the way but the will.  And we have no
+will because the first thing done with us in childhood was to break
+our will.  Can anything be more disgusting than the spectacle of a
+nation reading the biography of Gladstone and gloating over the
+account of how he was flogged at Eton, two of his schoolfellows being
+compelled to hold him down whilst he was flogged.  Not long ago a
+public body in England had to deal with the case of a schoolmaster
+who, conceiving himself insulted by the smoking of a cigaret against
+his orders by a pupil eighteen years old, proposed to flog him
+publicly as a satisfaction to what he called his honor and authority.
+I had intended to give the particulars of this ease, but find the
+drudgery of repeating such stuff too sickening, and the effect unjust
+to a man who was doing only what others all over the country were
+doing as part of the established routine of what is called education.
+The astounding part of it was the manner in which the person to whom
+this outrage on decency seemed quite proper and natural claimed to be
+a functionary of high character, and had his claim allowed.  In Japan
+he would hardly have been allowed the privilege of committing suicide.
+What is to be said of a profession in which such obscenities are made
+points of honor, or of institutions in which they are an accepted part
+of the daily routine?  Wholesome people would not argue about the
+taste of such nastinesses:  they would spit them out; but we are
+tainted with flagellomania from our childhood.  When will we realize
+that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however
+disgusting at first, makes it necessary for us to examine carefully
+everything we have become accustomed to?  Before motor cars became
+common, necessity had accustomed us to a foulness in our streets which
+would have horrified us had the street been our drawing-room carpet.
+Before long we shall be as particular about our streets as we now are
+about our carpets; and their condition in the nineteenth century will
+become as forgotten and incredible as the condition of the corridors
+of palaces and the courts of castles was as late as the eighteenth
+century.  This foulness, we can plead, was imposed on us as a
+necessity by the use of horses and of huge retinues; but flogging has
+never been so imposed:  it has always been a vice, craved for on any
+pretext by those depraved by it.  Boys were flogged when criminals
+were hanged, to impress the awful warning on them.  Boys were flogged
+at boundaries, to impress the boundaries on their memory.  Other
+methods and other punishments were always available:  the choice of
+this one betrayed the sensual impulse which makes the practice an
+abomination.  But when its viciousness made it customary, it was
+practised and tolerated on all hands by people who were innocent of
+anything worse than stupidity, ill temper, and inability to discover
+other methods of maintaining order than those they had always seen
+practised and approved of.  From children and animals it extended to
+slaves and criminals.  In the days of Moses it was limited to 39
+lashes.  In the early nineteenth century it had become an open
+madness:  soldiers were sentenced to a thousand lashes for trifling
+offences, with the result (among others less mentionable) that the
+Iron Duke of Wellington complained that it was impossible to get an
+order obeyed in the British army except in two or three crack
+regiments.  Such frantic excesses of this disgusting neurosis provoked
+a reaction against it; but the clamor for it by depraved persons never
+ceased, and was tolerated by a nation trained to it from childhood in
+the schools until last year (1913), when in what must be described as
+a paroxysm of sexual excitement provoked by the agitation concerning
+the White Slave Traffic (the purely commercial nature of which I was
+prevented from exposing on the stage by the Censorship twenty years
+ago) the Government yielded to an outcry for flagellation led by the
+Archbishop of Canterbury, and passed an Act under which a judge can
+sentence a man to be flogged to the utmost extremity with any
+instrument usable for such a purpose that he cares to prescribe.  Such
+an Act is not a legislative phenomenon but a psychopathic one.  Its
+effect on the White Slave Traffic was, of course, to distract public
+attention from its real cause and from the people who really profit by
+it to imaginary "foreign scoundrels," and to secure a monopoly of its
+organization for women.
+
+And all this evil is made possible by the schoolmaster with his cane
+and birch, by the parents getting rid as best they can of the nuisance
+of children making noise and mischief in the house, and by the denial
+to children of the elementary rights of human beings.
+
+The first man who enslaved and "broke in" an animal with a whip would
+have invented the explosion engine instead could he have foreseen the
+curse he was laying on his race.  For men and women learnt thereby to
+enslave and break in their children by the same means.  These
+children, grown up, knew no other methods of training.  Finally the
+evil that was done for gain by the greedy was refined on and done for
+pleasure by the lustful.  Flogging has become a pleasure purchasable
+in our streets, and inhibition a grown-up habit that children play at.
+"Go and see what baby is doing; and tell him he mustnt" is the last
+word of the nursery; and the grimmest aspect of it is that it was
+first formulated by a comic paper as a capital joke.
+
+
+
+Technical Instruction
+
+Technical instruction tempts to violence (as a short cut) more than
+liberal education.  The sailor in Mr Rudyard Kipling's Captains
+Courageous, teaching the boy the names of the ship's tackle with a
+rope's end, does not disgust us as our schoolmasters do, especially as
+the boy was a spoiled boy.  But an unspoiled boy would not have needed
+that drastic medicine.  Technical training may be as tedious as
+learning to skate or to play the piano or violin; but it is the price
+one must pay to achieve certain desirable results or necessary ends.
+It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or
+mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for
+the mental powers.  It would be monstrous even if it were true; for
+there is no labor that might not be imposed on a child or an adult on
+the same pretext; but as a glance at the average products of our
+public school and university education shews that it is not true, it
+need not trouble us.  But it is a fact that ignorance of Latin and
+Greek and mathematics closes certain careers to men (I do not mean
+artificial, unnecessary, noxious careers like those of the commercial
+schoolmaster).  Languages, even dead ones, have their uses; and, as it
+seems to many of us, mathematics have their uses.  They will always be
+learned by people who want to learn them; and people will always want
+to learn them as long as they are of any importance in life:  indeed
+the want will survive their importance:  superstition is nowhere
+stronger than in the field of obsolete acquirements.  And they will
+never be learnt fruitfully by people who do not want to learn them
+either for their own sake or for use in necessary work.  There is no
+harder schoolmaster than experience; and yet experience fails to teach
+where there is no desire to learn.
+
+Still, one must not begin to apply this generalization too early.  And
+this brings me to an important factor in the case:  the factor of
+evolution.
+
+
+
+Docility and Dependence
+
+If anyone, impressed by my view that the rights of a child are
+precisely those of an adult, proceeds to treat a child as if it were
+an adult, he (or she) will find that though the plan will work much
+better at some points than the usual plan, at others it will not work
+at all; and this discovery may provoke him to turn back from the whole
+conception of children's rights with a jest at the expense of
+bachelors' and old maids' children.  In dealing with children what is
+needed is not logic but sense.  There is no logical reason why young
+persons should be allowed greater control of their property the day
+after they are twenty-one than the day before it.  There is no logical
+reason why I, who strongly object to an adult standing over a boy of
+ten with a Latin grammar, and saying, "you must learn this, whether
+you want to or not," should nevertheless be quite prepared to stand
+over a boy of five with the multiplication table or a copy book or a
+code of elementary good manners, and practice on his docility to make
+him learn them.  And there is no logical reason why I should do for a
+child a great many little offices, some of them troublesome and
+disagreeable, which I should not do for a boy twice its age, or
+support a boy or girl when I would unhesitatingly throw an adult on
+his own resources.  But there are practical reasons, and sensible
+reasons, and affectionate reasons for all these illogicalities.
+Children do not want to be treated altogether as adults:  such
+treatment terrifies them and over-burdens them with responsibility.
+In truth, very few adults care to be called on for independence and
+originality:  they also are bewildered and terrified in the absence of
+precedents and precepts and commandments; but modern Democracy allows
+them a sanctioning and cancelling power if they are capable of using
+it, which children are not.  To treat a child wholly as an adult would
+be to mock and destroy it.  Infantile docility and juvenile dependence
+are, like death, a product of Natural Selection; and though there is
+no viler crime than to abuse them, yet there is no greater cruelty
+than to ignore them.  I have complained sufficiently of what I
+suffered through the process of assault, imprisonment, and compulsory
+lessons that taught me nothing, which are called my schooling.  But I
+could say a good deal also about the things I was not taught and
+should have been taught, not to mention the things I was allowed to do
+which I should not have been allowed to do.  I have no recollection of
+being taught to read or write; so I presume I was born with both
+faculties; but many people seem to have bitter recollections of being
+forced reluctantly to acquire them.  And though I have the uttermost
+contempt for a teacher so ill mannered and incompetent as to be unable
+to make a child learn to read and write without also making it cry,
+still I am prepared to admit that I had rather have been compelled to
+learn to read and write with tears by an incompetent and ill mannered
+person than left in ignorance.  Reading, writing, and enough
+arithmetic to use money honestly and accurately, together with the
+rudiments of law and order, become necessary conditions of a child's
+liberty before it can appreciate the importance of its liberty, or
+foresee that these accomplishments are worth acquiring.  Nature has
+provided for this by evolving the instinct of docility.  Children are
+very docile:  they have a sound intuition that they must do what they
+are told or perish.  And adults have an intuition, equally sound, that
+they must take advantage of this docility to teach children how to
+live properly or the children will not survive.  The difficulty is to
+know where to stop.  To illustrate this, let us consider the main
+danger of childish docility and parental officiousness.
+
+
+
+The Abuse of Docility
+
+Docility may survive as a lazy habit long after it has ceased to be a
+beneficial instinct.  If you catch a child when it is young enough to
+be instinctively docile, and keep it in a condition of unremitted
+tutelage under the nurserymaid, the governess, the preparatory school,
+the secondary school, and the university, until it is an adult, you
+will produce, not a self-reliant, free, fully matured human being, but
+a grown-up schoolboy or schoolgirl, capable of nothing in the way of
+original or independent action except outbursts of naughtiness in the
+women and blackguardism in the men.  That is exactly what we get at
+present in our rich and consequently governing classes:  they pass
+from juvenility to senility without ever touching maturity except in
+body.  The classes which cannot afford this sustained tutelage are
+notably more self-reliant and grown-up:  an office boy of fifteen is
+often more of a man than a university student of twenty.
+Unfortunately this precocity is disabled by poverty, ignorance,
+narrowness, and a hideous power of living without art or love or
+beauty and being rather proud of it.  The poor never escape from
+servitude:  their docility is preserved by their slavery.  And so all
+become the prey of the greedy, the selfish, the domineering, the
+unscrupulous, the predatory.  If here and there an individual refuses
+to be docile, ten docile persons will beat him or lock him up or shoot
+him or hang him at the bidding of his oppressors and their own.  The
+crux of the whole difficulty about parents, schoolmasters, priests,
+absolute monarchs, and despots of every sort, is the tendency to abuse
+natural docility.  A nation should always be healthily rebellious; but
+the king or prime minister has yet to be found who will make trouble
+by cultivating that side of the national spirit.  A child should begin
+to assert itself early, and shift for itself more and more not only in
+washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and conduct; yet as
+nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppish child, it is
+useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcate this
+uppishness.  Such unamiable precepts as Always contradict an
+authoritative statement, Always return a blow, Never lose a chance of
+a good fight, When you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who
+scolds you whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose, and
+follow the question with a blow or an insult or some other
+unmistakable expression of resentment, Remember that the progress of
+the world depends on your knowing better than your elders, are just as
+important as those of The Sermon on the Mount; but no one has yet seen
+them written up in letters of gold in a schoolroom or nursery.  The
+child is taught to be kind, to be respectful, to be quiet, not to
+answer back, to be truthful when its elders want to find out anything
+from it, to lie when the truth would shock or hurt its elders, to be
+above all things obedient, and to be seen and not heard.  Here we have
+two sets of precepts, each warranted to spoil a child hopelessly if
+the other be omitted.  Unfortunately we do not allow fair play between
+them.  The rebellious, intractable, aggressive, selfish set provoke a
+corrective resistance, and do not pretend to high moral or religious
+sanctions; and they are never urged by grown-up people on young
+people.  They are therefore more in danger of neglect or suppression
+than the other set, which have all the adults, all the laws, all the
+religions on their side.  How is the child to be secured its due share
+of both bodies of doctrine?
+
+
+
+The Schoolboy and the Homeboy
+
+In practice what happens is that parents notice that boys brought up
+at home become mollycoddles, or prigs, or duffers, unable to take care
+of themselves.  They see that boys should learn to rough it a little
+and to mix with children of their own age.  This is natural enough.
+When you have preached at and punished a boy until he is a moral
+cripple, you are as much hampered by him as by a physical cripple; and
+as you do not intend to have him on your hands all your life, and are
+generally rather impatient for the day when he will earn his own
+living and leave you to attend to yourself, you sooner or later begin
+to talk to him about the need for self-reliance, learning to think,
+and so forth, with the result that your victim, bewildered by your
+inconsistency, concludes that there is no use trying to please you,
+and falls into an attitude of sulky resentment.  Which is an
+additional inducement to pack him off to school.
+
+In school, he finds himself in a dual world, under two dispensations.
+There is the world of the boys, where the point of honor is to be
+untameable, always ready to fight, ruthless in taking the conceit out
+of anyone who ventures to give himself airs of superior knowledge or
+taste, and generally to take Lucifer for one's model.  And there is
+the world of the masters, the world of discipline, submission,
+diligence, obedience, and continual and shameless assumption of moral
+and intellectual authority.  Thus the schoolboy hears both sides, and
+is so far better off than the homebred boy who hears only one.  But
+the two sides are not fairly presented.  They are presented as good
+and evil, as vice and virtue, as villainy and heroism.  The boy feels
+mean and cowardly when he obeys, and selfish and rascally when he
+disobeys.  He looses his moral courage just as he comes to hate books
+and languages.  In the end, John Ruskin, tied so close to his mother's
+apron-string that he did not escape even when he went to Oxford, and
+John Stuart Mill, whose father ought to have been prosecuted for
+laying his son's childhood waste with lessons, were superior, as
+products of training, to our schoolboys.  They were very conspicuously
+superior in moral courage; and though they did not distinguish
+themselves at cricket and football, they had quite as much physical
+hardihood as any civilized man needs.  But it is to be observed that
+Ruskin's parents were wise people who gave John a full share in their
+own life, and put up with his presence both at home and abroad when
+they must sometimes have been very weary of him; and Mill, as it
+happens, was deliberately educated to challenge all the most sacred
+institutions of his country.  The households they were brought up in
+were no more average households than a Montessori school is an average
+school.
+
+
+
+The Comings of Age of Children
+
+All this inculcated adult docility, which wrecks every civilization as
+it is wrecking ours, is inhuman and unnatural.  We must reconsider our
+institution of the Coming of Age, which is too late for some purposes,
+and too early for others.  There should be a series of Coming of Ages
+for every individual.  The mammals have their first coming of age when
+they are weaned; and it is noteworthy that this rather cruel and
+selfish operation on the part of the parent has to be performed
+resolutely, with claws and teeth; for your little mammal does not want
+to be weaned, and yields only to a pretty rough assertion of the right
+of the parent to be relieved of the child as soon as the child is old
+enough to bear the separation.  The same thing occurs with children:
+they hang on to the mother's apron-string and the father's coat tails
+as long as they can, often baffling those sensitive parents who know
+that children should think for themselves and fend for themselves, but
+are too kind to throw them on their own resources with the ferocity of
+the domestic cat.  The child should have its first coming of age when
+it is weaned, another when it can talk, another when it can walk,
+another when it can dress itself without assistance; and when it can
+read, write, count money, and pass an examination in going a simple
+errand involving a purchase and a journey by rail or other public
+method of locomotion, it should have quite a majority.  At present the
+children of laborers are soon mobile and able to shift for themselves,
+whereas it is possible to find grown-up women in the rich classes who
+are actually afraid to take a walk in the streets unattended and
+unprotected.  It is true that this is a superstition from the time
+when a retinue was part of the state of persons of quality, and the
+unattended person was supposed to be a common person of no quality,
+earning a living; but this has now become so absurd that children and
+young women are no longer told why they are forbidden to go about
+alone, and have to be persuaded that the streets are dangerous places,
+which of course they are; but people who are not educated to live
+dangerously have only half a life, and are more likely to die
+miserably after all than those who have taken all the common risks of
+freedom from their childhood onward as matters of course.
+
+
+
+The Conflict of Wills
+
+The world wags in spite of its schools and its families because both
+schools and families are mostly very largely anarchic:  parents and
+schoolmasters are good-natured or weak or lazy; and children are
+docile and affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits of
+naughtiness; and so most families slummock along and muddle through
+until the children cease to be children.  In the few cases when the
+parties are energetic and determined, the child is crushed or the
+parent is reduced to a cipher, as the case may be.  When the opposed
+forces are neither of them strong enough to annihilate the other,
+there is serious trouble:  that is how we get those feuds between
+parent and child which recur to our memory so ironically when we hear
+people sentimentalizing about natural affection.  We even get
+tragedies; for there is nothing so tragic to contemplate or so
+devastating to suffer as the oppression of will without conscience;
+and the whole tendency of our family and school system is to set the
+will of the parent and the school despot above conscience as something
+that must be deferred to abjectly and absolutely for its own sake.
+
+The strongest, fiercest force in nature is human will.  It is the
+highest organization we know of the will that has created the whole
+universe.  Now all honest civilization, religion, law, and convention
+is an attempt to keep this force within beneficent bounds.  What
+corrupts civilization, religion, law, and convention (and they are at
+present pretty nearly as corrupt as they dare) is the constant
+attempts made by the wills of individuals and classes to thwart the
+wills and enslave the powers of other individuals and classes.  The
+powers of the parent and the schoolmaster, and of their public
+analogues the lawgiver and the judge, become instruments of tyranny in
+the hands of those who are too narrow-minded to understand law and
+exercise judgment; and in their hands (with us they mostly fall into
+such hands) law becomes tyranny.  And what is a tyrant?  Quite simply
+a person who says to another person, young or old, "You shall do as I
+tell you; you shall make what I want; you shall profess my creed; you
+shall have no will of your own; and your powers shall be at the
+disposal of my will."  It has come to this at last:  that the phrase
+"she has a will of her own," or "he has a will of his own" has come to
+denote a person of exceptional obstinacy and self-assertion.  And even
+persons of good natural disposition, if brought up to expect such
+deference, are roused to unreasoning fury, and sometimes to the
+commission of atrocious crimes, by the slightest challenge to their
+authority.  Thus a laborer may be dirty, drunken, untruthful,
+slothful, untrustworthy in every way without exhausting the indulgence
+of the country house.  But let him dare to be "disrespectful" and he
+is a lost man, though he be the cleanest, soberest, most diligent,
+most veracious, most trustworthy man in the county.  Dickens's
+instinct for detecting social cankers never served him better than
+when he shewed us Mrs Heep teaching her son to "be umble," knowing
+that if he carried out that precept he might be pretty well anything
+else he liked.  The maintenance of deference to our wills becomes a
+mania which will carry the best of us to any extremity.  We will allow
+a village of Egyptian fellaheen or Indian tribesmen to live the lowest
+life they please among themselves without molestation; but let one of
+them slay an Englishman or even strike him on the strongest
+provocation, and straightway we go stark mad, burning and destroying,
+shooting and shelling, flogging and hanging, if only such survivors as
+we may leave are thoroughly cowed in the presence of a man with a
+white face.  In the committee room of a local council or city
+corporation, the humblest employees of the committee find defenders if
+they complain of harsh treatment.  Gratuities are voted, indulgences
+and holidays are pleaded for, delinquencies are excused in the most
+sentimental manner provided only the employee, however patent a
+hypocrite or incorrigible a slacker, is hat in hand.  But let the most
+obvious measure of justice be demanded by the secretary of a Trade
+Union in terms which omit all expressions of subservience, and it is
+with the greatest difficulty that the cooler-headed can defeat angry
+motions that the letter be thrown into the waste paper basket and the
+committee proceed to the next business.
+
+
+
+The Demagogue's Opportunity
+
+And the employee has in him the same fierce impulse to impose his will
+without respect for the will of others.  Democracy is in practice
+nothing but a device for cajoling from him the vote he refuses to
+arbitrary authority.  He will not vote for Coriolanus; but when an
+experienced demagogue comes along and says, "Sir:  _you_ are the
+dictator:  the voice of the people is the voice of God; and I am only
+your very humble servant," he says at once, "All right:  tell me what
+to dictate," and is presently enslaved more effectually with his own
+silly consent than Coriolanus would ever have enslaved him without
+asking his leave.  And the trick by which the demagogue defeats
+Coriolanus is played on him in his turn by _his_ inferiors.
+Everywhere we see the cunning succeeding in the world by seeking a
+rich or powerful master and practising on his lust for subservience.
+The political adventurer who gets into parliament by offering himself
+to the poor voter, not as his representative but as his will-less
+soulless "delegate," is himself the dupe of a clever wife who
+repudiates Votes for Women, knowing well that whilst the man is
+master, the man's mistress will rule.  Uriah Heep may be a crawling
+creature; but his crawling takes him upstairs.
+
+Thus does the selfishness of the will turn on itself, and obtain by
+flattery what it cannot seize by open force.  Democracy becomes the
+latest trick of tyranny:  "womanliness" becomes the latest wile of
+prostitution.
+
+Between parent and child the same conflict wages and the same
+destruction of character ensues.  Parents set themselves to bend the
+will of their children to their own--to break their stubborn spirit,
+as they call it--with the ruthlessness of Grand Inquisitors.  Cunning,
+unscrupulous children learn all the arts of the sneak in circumventing
+tyranny:  children of better character are cruelly distressed and more
+or less lamed for life by it.
+
+
+
+Our Quarrelsomeness
+
+As between adults, we find a general quarrelsomeness which makes
+political reform as impossible to most Englishmen as to hogs.  Certain
+sections of the nation get cured of this disability.  University men,
+sailors, and politicians are comparatively free from it, because the
+communal life of the University, the fact that in a ship a man must
+either learn to consider others or else go overboard or into irons,
+and the habit of working on committees and ceasing to expect more of
+one's own way than is included in the greatest common measure of the
+committee, educate the will socially.  But no one who has ever had to
+guide a committee of ordinary private Englishmen through their first
+attempts at collective action, in committee or otherwise, can retain
+any illusions as to the appalling effects on our national manners and
+character of the organization of the home and the school as petty
+tyrannies, and the absence of all teaching of self-respect and
+training in self-assertion.  Bullied and ordered about, the Englishman
+obeys like a sheep, evades like a knave, or tries to murder his
+oppressor.  Merely criticized or opposed in committee, or invited to
+consider anybody's views but his own, he feels personally insulted and
+wants to resign or leave the room unless he is apologized to.  And his
+panic and bewilderment when he sees that the older hands at the work
+have no patience with him and do not intend to treat him as
+infallible, are pitiable as far as they are anything but ludicrous.
+That is what comes of not being taught to consider other people's
+wills, and left to submit to them or to over-ride them as if they were
+the winds and the weather.  Such a state of mind is incompatible not
+only with the democratic introduction of high civilization, but with
+the comprehension and maintenance of such civilized institutions as
+have been introduced by benevolent and intelligent despots and
+aristocrats.
+
+
+
+We Must Reform Society before we can Reform Ourselves
+
+When we come to the positive problem of what to do with children if we
+are to give up the established plan, we find the difficulties so great
+that we begin to understand why so many people who detest the system
+and look back with loathing on their own schooldays, must helplessly
+send their children to the very schools they themselves were sent to,
+because there is no alternative except abandoning the children to
+undisciplined vagabondism.  Man in society must do as everybody else
+does in his class:  only fools and romantic novices imagine that
+freedom is a mere matter of the readiness of the individual to snap
+his fingers at convention.  It is true that most of us live in a
+condition of quite unnecessary inhibition, wearing ugly and
+uncomfortable clothes, making ourselves and other people miserable by
+the heathen horrors of mourning, staying away from the theatre because
+we cannot afford the stalls and are ashamed to go to the pit, and in
+dozens of other ways enslaving ourselves when there are comfortable
+alternatives open to us without any real drawbacks.  The contemplation
+of these petty slaveries, and of the triumphant ease with which
+sensible people throw them off, creates an impression that if we only
+take Johnson's advice to free our minds from cant, we can achieve
+freedom.  But if we all freed our minds from cant we should find that
+for the most part we should have to go on doing the necessary work of
+the world exactly as we did it before until we organized new and free
+methods of doing it.  Many people believed in secondary co-education
+(boys and girls taught together) before schools like Bedales were
+founded:  indeed the practice was common enough in elementary schools
+and in Scotland; but their belief did not help them until Bedales and
+St George's were organized; and there are still not nearly enough
+co-educational schools in existence to accommodate all the children of
+the parents who believe in co-education up to university age, even if
+they could always afford the fees of these exceptional schools.  It
+may be edifying to tell a duke that our public schools are all wrong
+in their constitution and methods, or a costermonger that children
+should be treated as in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister instead of as they
+are treated at the elementary school at the corner of his street; but
+what are the duke and the coster to do?  Neither of them has any
+effective choice in the matter:  their children must either go to the
+schools that are, or to no school at all.  And as the duke thinks with
+reason that his son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does
+not go to school, and the coster knows that his son will become an
+illiterate hooligan if he is left to the streets, there is no real
+alternative for either of them.  Child life must be socially
+organized:  no parent, rich or poor, can choose institutions that do
+not exist; and the private enterprise of individual school masters
+appealing to a group of well-to-do parents, though it may shew what
+can be done by enthusiasts with new methods, cannot touch the mass of
+our children.  For the average parent or child nothing is really
+available except the established practice; and this is what makes it
+so important that the established practice should be a sound one, and
+so useless for clever individuals to disparage it unless they can
+organize an alternative practice and make it, too, general.
+
+
+
+The Pursuit of Manners
+
+If you cross-examine the duke and the coster, you will find that they
+are not concerned for the scholastic attainments of their children.
+Ask the duke whether he could pass the standard examination of
+twelve-year-old children in elementary schools, and he will admit,
+with an entirely placid smile, that he would almost certainly be
+ignominiously plucked.  And he is so little ashamed of or
+disadvantaged by his condition that he is not prepared to spend an
+hour in remedying it.  The coster may resent the inquiry instead of
+being amused by it; but his answer, if true, will be the same.  What
+they both want for their children is the communal training, the
+apprenticeship to society, the lessons in holding one's own among
+people of all sorts with whom one is not, as in the home, on
+privileged terms.  These can be acquired only by "mixing with the
+world," no matter how wicked the world is.  No parent cares twopence
+whether his children can write Latin hexameters or repeat the dates of
+the accession of all the English monarchs since the Conqueror; but all
+parents are earnestly anxious about the manners of their children.
+Better Claude Duval than Kaspar Hauser.  Laborers who are
+contemptuously anti-clerical in their opinions will send their
+daughters to the convent school because the nuns teach them some sort
+of gentleness of speech and behavior.  And peers who tell you that our
+public schools are rotten through and through, and that our
+Universities ought to be razed to the foundations, send their sons to
+Eton and Oxford, Harrow and Cambridge, not only because there is
+nothing else to be done, but because these places, though they turn
+out blackguards and ignoramuses and boobies galore, turn them out with
+the habits and manners of the society they belong to.  Bad as those
+manners are in many respects, they are better than no manners at all.
+And no individual or family can possibly teach them.  They can be
+acquired only by living in an organized community in which they are
+traditional.
+
+Thus we see that there are reasons for the segregation of children
+even in families where the great reason:  namely, that children are
+nuisances to adults, does not press very hardly, as, for instance, in
+the houses of the very poor, who can send their children to play in
+the streets, or the houses of the very rich, which are so large that
+the children's quarters can be kept out of the parents' way like the
+servants' quarters.
+
+
+
+Not too much Wind on the Heath, Brother
+
+What, then, is to be done?  For the present, unfortunately, little
+except propagating the conception of Children's Rights.  Only the
+achievement of economic equality through Socialism can make it
+possible to deal thoroughly with the question from the point of view
+of the total interest of the community, which must always consist of
+grown-up children.  Yet economic equality, like all simple and obvious
+arrangements, seems impossible to people brought up as children are
+now.  Still, something can be done even within class limits.  Large
+communities of children of the same class are possible today; and
+voluntary organization of outdoor life for children has already begun
+in Boy Scouting and excursions of one kind or another.  The discovery
+that anything, even school life, is better for the child than home
+life, will become an over-ridden hobby; and we shall presently be told
+by our faddists that anything, even camp life, is better than school
+life.  Some blundering beginnings of this are already perceptible.
+There is a movement for making our British children into priggish
+little barefooted vagabonds, all talking like that born fool George
+Borrow, and supposed to be splendidly healthy because they would die
+if they slept in rooms with the windows shut, or perhaps even with a
+roof over their heads.  Still, this is a fairly healthy folly; and it
+may do something to establish Mr Harold Cox's claim of a Right to Roam
+as the basis of a much needed law compelling proprietors of land to
+provide plenty of gates in their fences, and to leave them unlocked
+when there are no growing crops to be damaged nor bulls to be
+encountered, instead of, as at present, imprisoning the human race in
+dusty or muddy thoroughfares between walls of barbed wire.
+
+The reaction against vagabondage will come from the children
+themselves.  For them freedom will not mean the expensive kind of
+savagery now called "the simple life."  Their natural disgust with the
+visions of cockney book fanciers blowing themselves out with "the wind
+on the heath, brother," and of anarchists who are either too weak to
+understand that men are strong and free in proportion to the social
+pressure they can stand and the complexity of the obligations they are
+prepared to undertake, or too strong to realize that what is freedom
+to them may be terror and bewilderment to others, will drive them back
+to the home and the school if these have meanwhile learned the lesson
+that children are independent human beings and have rights.
+
+
+
+Wanted:  a Child's Magna Charta
+
+Whether we shall presently be discussing a Juvenile Magna Charta or
+Declaration of Rights by way of including children in the Constitution
+is a question on which I leave others to speculate.  But if it could
+once be established that a child has an adult's Right of Egress from
+uncomfortable places and unpleasant company, and there were children's
+lawyers to sue pedagogues and others for assault and imprisonment,
+there would be an amazing change in the behavior of schoolmasters, the
+quality of school books, and the amenities of school life.  That
+Consciousness of Consent which, even in its present delusive form, has
+enabled Democracy to oust tyrannical systems in spite of all its
+vulgarities and stupidities and rancors and ineptitudes and
+ignorances, would operate as powerfully among children as it does now
+among grown-ups.  No doubt the pedagogue would promptly turn
+demagogue, and woo his scholars by all the arts of demagogy; but none
+of these arts can easily be so dishonorable or mischievous as the art
+of caning.  And, after all, if larger liberties are attached to the
+acquisition of knowledge, and the child finds that it can no more go
+to the seaside without a knowledge of the multiplication and pence
+tables than it can be an astronomer without mathematics, it will learn
+the multiplication table, which is more than it always does at
+present, in spite of all the canings and keepings in.
+
+
+
+The Pursuit of Learning
+
+When the Pursuit of Learning comes to mean the pursuit of learning by
+the child instead of the pursuit of the child by Learning, cane in
+hand, the danger will be precocity of the intellect, which is just as
+undesirable as precocity of the emotions.  We still have a silly habit
+of talking and thinking as if intellect were a mechanical process and
+not a passion; and in spite of the German tutors who confess openly
+that three out of every five of the young men they coach for
+examinations are lamed for life thereby; in spite of Dickens and his
+picture of little Paul Dombey dying of lessons, we persist in heaping
+on growing children and adolescent youths and maidens tasks Pythagoras
+would have declined out of common regard for his own health and common
+modesty as to his own capacity.  And this overwork is not all the
+effect of compulsion; for the average schoolmaster does not compel his
+scholars to learn:  he only scolds and punishes them if they do not,
+which is quite a different thing, the net effect being that the school
+prisoners need not learn unless they like.  Nay, it is sometimes
+remarked that the school dunce--meaning the one who does not
+like--often turns out well afterwards, as if idleness were a sign of
+ability and character.  A much more sensible explanation is that the
+so-called dunces are not exhausted before they begin the serious
+business of life.  It is said that boys will be boys; and one can only
+add one wishes they would.  Boys really want to be manly, and are
+unfortunately encouraged thoughtlessly in this very dangerous and
+overstraining aspiration.  All the people who have really worked
+(Herbert Spencer for instance) warn us against work as earnestly as
+some people warn us against drink.  When learning is placed on the
+voluntary footing of sport, the teacher will find himself saying every
+day "Run away and play:  you have worked as much as is good for you."
+Trying to make children leave school will be like trying to make them
+go to bed; and it will be necessary to surprise them with the idea
+that teaching is work, and that the teacher is tired and must go play
+or rest or eat:  possibilities always concealed by that infamous
+humbug the current schoolmaster, who achieves a spurious divinity and
+a witch doctor's authority by persuading children that he is not
+human, just as ladies persuade them that they have no legs.
+
+
+
+Children and Game:  a Proposal
+
+Of the many wild absurdities of our existing social order perhaps the
+most grotesque is the costly and strictly enforced reservation of
+large tracts of country as deer forests and breeding grounds for
+pheasants whilst there is so little provision of the kind made for
+children.  I have more than once thought of trying to introduce the
+shooting of children as a sport, as the children would then be
+preserved very carefully for ten months in the year, thereby reducing
+their death rate far more than the fusillades of the sportsmen during
+the other two would raise it.  At present the killing of a fox except
+by a pack of foxhounds is regarded with horror; but you may and do
+kill children in a hundred and fifty ways provided you do not shoot
+them or set a pack of dogs on them.  It must be admitted that the
+foxes have the best of it; and indeed a glance at our pheasants, our
+deer, and our children will convince the most sceptical that the
+children have decidedly the worst of it.
+
+This much hope, however, can be extracted from the present state of
+things.  It is so fantastic, so mad, so apparently impossible, that no
+scheme of reform need ever henceforth be discredited on the ground
+that it is fantastic or mad or apparently impossible.  It is the
+sensible schemes, unfortunately, that are hopeless in England.
+Therefore I have great hopes that my own views, though fundamentally
+sensible, can be made to appear fantastic enough to have a chance.
+
+First, then, I lay it down as a prime condition of sane society,
+obvious as such to anyone but an idiot, that in any decent community,
+children should find in every part of their native country, food,
+clothing, lodging, instruction, and parental kindness for the asking.
+For the matter of that, so should adults; but the two cases differ in
+that as these commodities do not grow on the bushes, the adults cannot
+have them unless they themselves organize and provide the supply,
+whereas the children must have them as if by magic, with nothing to do
+but rub the lamp, like Aladdin, and have their needs satisfied.
+
+
+
+The Parents' Intolerable Burden
+
+There is nothing new in this:  it is how children have always had and
+must always have their needs satisfied.  The parent has to play the
+part of Aladdin's djinn; and many a parent has sunk beneath the burden
+of this service.  All the novelty we need is to organize it so that
+instead of the individual child fastening like a parasite on its own
+particular parents, the whole body of children should be thrown not
+only upon the whole body of parents, but upon the celibates and
+childless as well, whose present exemption from a full share in the
+social burden of children is obviously unjust and unwholesome.  Today
+it is easy to find a widow who has at great cost to herself in pain,
+danger, and disablement, borne six or eight children.  In the same
+town you will find rich bachelors and old maids, and married couples
+with no children or with families voluntarily limited to two or three.
+The eight children do not belong to the woman in any real or legal
+sense.  When she has reared them they pass away from her into the
+community as independent persons, marrying strangers, working for
+strangers, spending on the community the life that has been built up
+at her expense.  No more monstrous injustice could be imagined than
+that the burden of rearing the children should fall on her alone and
+not on the celibates and the selfish as well.
+
+This is so far recognized that already the child finds, wherever it
+goes, a school for it, and somebody to force it into the school; and
+more and more these schools are being driven by the mere logic of
+facts to provide the children with meals, with boots, with spectacles,
+with dentists and doctors.  In fact, when the child's parents are
+destitute or not to be found, bread, lodging, and clothing are
+provided.  It is true that they are provided grudgingly and on
+conditions infamous enough to draw down abundant fire from Heaven upon
+us every day in the shape of crime and disease and vice; but still the
+practice of keeping children barely alive at the charge of the
+community is established; and there is no need for me to argue about
+it.  I propose only two extensions of the practice.  One is to provide
+for all the child's reasonable human wants, on which point, if you
+differ from me, I shall take leave to say that you are socially a fool
+and personally an inhuman wretch.  The other is that these wants
+should be supplied in complete freedom from compulsory schooling or
+compulsory anything except restraint from crime, though, as they can
+be supplied only by social organization, the child must be conscious
+of and subject to the conditions of that organization, which may
+involve such portions of adult responsibility and duty as a child may
+be able to bear according to its age, and which will in any case
+prevent it from forming the vagabond and anarchist habit of mind.
+
+One more exception might be necessary:  compulsory freedom.  I am sure
+that a child should not be imprisoned in a school.  I am not so sure
+that it should not sometimes be driven out into the open--imprisoned
+in the woods and on the mountains, as it were.  For there are frowsty
+children, just as there are frowsty adults, who dont want freedom.
+This morbid result of over-domestication would, let us hope, soon
+disappear with its cause.
+
+
+
+Mobilization
+
+Those who see no prospect held out to them by this except a country in
+which all the children shall be roaming savages, should consider,
+first, whether their condition would be any worse than that of the
+little caged savages of today, and second, whether either children or
+adults are so apt to run wild that it is necessary to tether them fast
+to one neighborhood to prevent a general dissolution of society.  My
+own observation leads me to believe that we are not half mobilized
+enough.  True, I cannot deny that we are more mobile than we were.
+You will still find in the home counties old men who have never been
+to London, and who tell you that they once went to Winchester or St
+Albans much as if they had been to the South Pole; but they are not so
+common as the clerk who has been to Paris or to Lovely Lucerne, and
+who "goes away somewhere" when he has a holiday.  His grandfather
+never had a holiday, and, if he had, would no more have dreamed of
+crossing the Channel than of taking a box at the Opera.  But with all
+allowance for the Polytechnic excursion and the tourist agency, our
+inertia is still appalling.  I confess to having once spent nine years
+in London without putting my nose outside it; and though this was
+better, perhaps, than the restless globe-trotting vagabondage of the
+idle rich, wandering from hotel to hotel and never really living
+anywhere, yet I should no more have done it if I had been properly
+mobilized in my childhood than I should have worn the same suit of
+clothes all that time (which, by the way, I very nearly did, my
+professional income not having as yet begun to sprout).  There are
+masses of people who could afford at least a trip to Margate, and a
+good many who could afford a trip round the world, who are more
+immovable than Aldgate pump.  To others, who would move if they knew
+how, travelling is surrounded with imaginary difficulties and terrors.
+In short, the difficulty is not to fix people, but to root them up.
+We keep repeating the silly proverb that a rolling stone gathers no
+moss, as if moss were a desirable parasite.  What we mean is that a
+vagabond does not prosper.  Even this is not true, if prosperity means
+enjoyment as well as responsibility and money.  The real misery of
+vagabondage is the misery of having nothing to do and nowhere to go,
+the misery of being derelict of God and Man, the misery of the idle,
+poor or rich.  And this is one of the miseries of unoccupied
+childhood.  The unoccupied adult, thus afflicted, tries many
+distractions which are, to say the least, unsuited to children.  But
+one of them, the distraction of seeing the world, is innocent and
+beneficial.  Also it is childish, being a continuation of what nurses
+call "taking notice," by which a child becomes experienced.  It is
+pitiable nowadays to see men and women doing after the age of 45 all
+the travelling and sightseeing they should have done before they were
+15.  Mere wondering and staring at things is an important part of a
+child's education:  that is why children can be thoroughly mobilized
+without making vagabonds of them.  A vagabond is at home nowhere
+because he wanders:  a child should wander because it ought to be at
+home everywhere.  And if it has its papers and its passports, and gets
+what it requires not by begging and pilfering, but from responsible
+agents of the community as of right, and with some formal
+acknowledgment of the obligations it is incurring and a knowledge of
+the fact that these obligations are being recorded:  if, further,
+certain qualifications are exacted before it is promoted from
+permission to go as far as its legs will carry it to using mechanical
+aids to locomotion, it can roam without much danger of gypsification.
+
+Under such circumstances the boy or girl could always run away, and
+never be lost; and on no other conditions can a child be free without
+being also a homeless outcast.
+
+Parents could also run away from disagreeable children or drive them
+out of doors or even drop their acquaintance, temporarily or
+permanently, without inhumanity.  Thus both parties would be on their
+good behavior, and not, as at present, on their filial or parental
+behavior, which, like all unfree behavior, is mostly bad behavior.
+
+As to what other results might follow, we had better wait and see; for
+nobody now alive can imagine what customs and institutions would grow
+up in societies of free children.  Child laws and child fashions,
+child manners and child morals are now not tolerated; but among free
+children there would certainly be surprising developments in this
+direction.  I do not think there would be any danger of free children
+behaving as badly as grown-up people do now because they have never
+been free.  They could hardly behave worse, anyhow.
+
+
+
+Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs
+
+A very distinguished man once assured a mother of my acquaintance that
+she would never know what it meant to be hurt until she was hurt
+through her children.  Children are extremely cruel without intending
+it; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they
+do not conceive their elders as having any human feelings.  Serve the
+elders right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman!  The penalty of the
+impostor is not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but that he
+is taken for what he pretends to be, and treated as such.  And to be
+treated as anything but what you really are may seem pleasant to the
+imagination when the treatment is above your merits; but in actual
+experience it is often quite the reverse.  When I was a very small
+boy, my romantic imagination, stimulated by early doses of fiction,
+led me to brag to a still smaller boy so outrageously that he, being a
+simple soul, really believed me to be an invincible hero.  I cannot
+remember whether this pleased me much; but I do remember very
+distinctly that one day this admirer of mine, who had a pet goat,
+found the animal in the hands of a larger boy than either of us, who
+mocked him and refused to restore the animal to his rightful owner.
+Whereupon, naturally, he came weeping to me, and demanded that I
+should rescue the goat and annihilate the aggressor.  My terror was
+beyond description:  fortunately for me, it imparted such a
+ghastliness to my voice and aspect as I under the eye of my poor
+little dupe, advanced on the enemy with that hideous extremity of
+cowardice which is called the courage of despair, and said "You let go
+that goat," that he abandoned his prey and fled, to my unforgettable,
+unspeakable relief.  I have never since exaggerated my prowess in
+bodily combat.
+
+Now what happened to me in the adventure of the goat happens very
+often to parents, and would happen to schoolmasters if the prison door
+of the school did not shut out the trials of life.  I remember once,
+at school, the resident head master was brought down to earth by the
+sudden illness of his wife.  In the confusion that ensued it became
+necessary to leave one of the schoolrooms without a master.  I was in
+the class that occupied that schoolroom.  To have sent us home would
+have been to break the fundamental bargain with our parents by which
+the school was bound to keep us out of their way for half the day at
+all hazards.  Therefore an appeal had to be made to our better
+feelings:  that is, to our common humanity, not to make a noise.  But
+the head master had never admitted any common humanity with us.  We
+had been carefully broken in to regard him as a being quite aloof from
+and above us:  one not subject to error or suffering or death or
+illness or mortality.  Consequently sympathy was impossible; and if
+the unfortunate lady did not perish, it was because, as I now comfort
+myself with guessing, she was too much pre-occupied with her own
+pains, and possibly making too much noise herself, to be conscious of
+the pandemonium downstairs.
+
+A great deal of the fiendishness of schoolboys and the cruelty of
+children to their elders is produced just in this way.  Elders cannot
+be superhuman beings and suffering fellow-creatures at the same time.
+If you pose as a little god, you must pose for better for worse.
+
+
+
+How Little We Know About Our Parents
+
+The relation between parent and child has cruel moments for the parent
+even when money is no object, and the material worries are delegated
+to servants and school teachers.  The child and the parent are
+strangers to one another necessarily, because their ages must differ
+widely.  Read Goethe's autobiography; and note that though he was
+happy in his parents and had exceptional powers of observation,
+divination, and story-telling, he knew less about his father and
+mother than about most of the other people he mentions.  I myself was
+never on bad terms with my mother:  we lived together until I was
+forty-two years old, absolutely without the smallest friction of any
+kind; yet when her death set me thinking curiously about our
+relations, I realized that I knew very little about her.  Introduce me
+to a strange woman who was a child when I was a child, a girl when I
+was a boy, an adolescent when I was an adolescent; and if we take
+naturally to one another I will know more of her and she of me at the
+end of forty days (I had almost said of forty minutes) than I knew of
+my mother at the end of forty years.  A contemporary stranger is a
+novelty and an enigma, also a possibility; but a mother is like a
+broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as
+far as one's knowledge of her is concerned:  the broomstick is there
+and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed
+and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not
+conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still
+growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.  If I meet a widow I may
+ask her all about her marriage; but what son ever dreams of asking his
+mother about her marriage, or could endure to hear of it without
+violently breaking off the old sacred relationship between them, and
+ceasing to be her child or anything more to her than the first man in
+the street might be?
+
+Yet though in this sense the child cannot realize its parent's
+humanity, the parent can realize the child's; for the parents with
+their experience of life have none of the illusions about the child
+that the child has about the parents; and the consequence is that the
+child can hurt its parents' feelings much more than its parents can
+hurt the child's, because the child, even when there has been none of
+the deliberate hypocrisy by which children are taken advantage of by
+their elders, cannot conceive the parent as a fellow-creature, whilst
+the parents know very well that the children are only themselves over
+again.  The child cannot conceive that its blame or contempt or want
+of interest could possibly hurt its parent, and therefore expresses
+them all with an indifference which has given rise to the term _enfant
+terrible_ (a tragic term in spite of the jests connected with it);
+whilst the parent can suffer from such slights and reproaches more
+from a child than from anyone else, even when the child is not
+beloved, because the child is so unmistakably sincere in them.
+
+
+
+Our Abandoned Mothers
+
+Take a very common instance of this agonizing incompatibility.  A
+widow brings up her son to manhood.  He meets a strange woman, and
+goes off with and marries her, leaving his mother desolate.  It does
+not occur to him that this is at all hard on her:  he does it as a
+matter of course, and actually expects his mother to receive, on terms
+of special affection, the woman for whom she has been abandoned.  If
+he shewed any sense of what he was doing, any remorse; if he mingled
+his tears with hers and asked her not to think too hardly of him
+because he had obeyed the inevitable destiny of a man to leave his
+father and mother and cleave to his wife, she could give him her
+blessing and accept her bereavement with dignity and without reproach.
+But the man never dreams of such considerations.  To him his mother's
+feeling in the matter, when she betrays it, is unreasonable,
+ridiculous, and even odious, as shewing a prejudice against his
+adorable bride.
+
+I have taken the widow as an extreme and obvious case; but there are
+many husbands and wives who are tired of their consorts, or
+disappointed in them, or estranged from them by infidelities; and
+these parents, in losing a son or a daughter through marriage, may be
+losing everything they care for.  No parent's love is as innocent as
+the love of a child:  the exclusion of all conscious sexual feeling
+from it does not exclude the bitterness, jealousy, and despair at loss
+which characterize sexual passion:  in fact, what is called a pure
+love may easily be more selfish and jealous than a carnal one.
+Anyhow, it is plain matter of fact that naively selfish people
+sometimes try with fierce jealousy to prevent their children marrying.
+
+
+
+Family Affection
+
+Until the family as we know it ceases to exist, nobody will dare to
+analyze parental affection as distinguished from that general human
+sympathy which has secured to many an orphan fonder care in a
+stranger's house than it would have received from its actual parents.
+Not even Tolstoy, in The Kreutzer Sonata, has said all that we suspect
+about it.  When it persists beyond the period at which it ceases to be
+necessary to the child's welfare, it is apt to be morbid; and we are
+probably wrong to inculcate its deliberate cultivation.  The natural
+course is for the parents and children to cast off the specific
+parental and filial relation when they are no longer necessary to one
+another.  The child does this readily enough to form fresh ties,
+closer and more fascinating.  Parents are not always excluded from
+such compensations:  it happens sometimes that when the children go
+out at the door the lover comes in at the window.  Indeed it happens
+now oftener than it used to, because people remain much longer in the
+sexual arena.  The cultivated Jewess no longer cuts off her hair at
+her marriage.  The British matron has discarded her cap and her
+conscientious ugliness; and a bishop's wife at fifty has more of the
+air of a _femme galante_ than an actress had at thirty-five in her
+grandmother's time.  But as people marry later, the facts of age and
+time still inexorably condemn most parents to comparative solitude
+when their children marry.  This may be a privation and may be a
+relief:  probably in healthy circumstances it is no worse than a
+salutary change of habit; but even at that it is, for the moment at
+least, a wrench.  For though parents and children sometimes dislike
+one another, there is an experience of succor and a habit of
+dependence and expectation formed in infancy which naturally attaches
+a child to its parent or to its nurse (a foster parent) in a quite
+peculiar way.  A benefit to the child may be a burden to the parent;
+but people become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the
+burdens are attached to them; and to "suffer little children" has
+become an affectionate impulse deep in our nature.
+
+Now there is no such impulse to suffer our sisters and brothers, our
+aunts and uncles, much less our cousins.  If we could choose our
+relatives, we might, by selecting congenial ones, mitigate the
+repulsive effect of the obligation to like them and to admit them to
+our intimacy.  But to have a person imposed on us as a brother merely
+because he happens to have the same parents is unbearable when, as may
+easily happen, he is the sort of person we should carefully avoid if
+he were anyone else's brother.  All Europe (except Scotland, which has
+clans instead of families) draws the line at second cousins.
+Protestantism draws it still closer by making the first cousin a
+marriageable stranger; and the only reason for not drawing it at
+sisters and brothers is that the institution of the family compels us
+to spend our childhood with them, and thus imposes on us a curious
+relation in which familiarity destroys romantic charm, and is yet
+expected to create a specially warm affection.  Such a relation is
+dangerously factitious and unnatural; and the practical moral is that
+the less said at home about specific family affection the better.
+Children, like grown-up people, get on well enough together if they
+are not pushed down one another's throats; and grown-up relatives will
+get on together in proportion to their separation and their care not
+to presume on their blood relationship.  We should let children's
+feelings take their natural course without prompting.  I have seen a
+child scolded and called unfeeling because it did not occur to it to
+make a theatrical demonstration of affectionate delight when its
+mother returned after an absence:  a typical example of the way in
+which spurious family sentiment is stoked up.  We are, after all,
+sociable animals; and if we are let alone in the matter of our
+affections, and well brought up otherwise, we shall not get on any the
+worse with particular people because they happen to be our brothers
+and sisters and cousins.  The danger lies in assuming that we shall
+get on any better.
+
+The main point to grasp here is that families are not kept together at
+present by family feeling but by human feeling.  The family cultivates
+sympathy and mutual help and consolation as any other form of kindly
+association cultivates them; but the addition of a dictated compulsory
+affection as an attribute of near kinship is not only unnecessary, but
+positively detrimental; and the alleged tendency of modern social
+development to break up the family need alarm nobody.  We cannot break
+up the facts of kinship nor eradicate its natural emotional
+consequences.  What we can do and ought to do is to set people free to
+behave naturally and to change their behavior as circumstances change.
+To impose on a citizen of London the family duties of a Highland
+cateran in the eighteenth century is as absurd as to compel him to
+carry a claymore and target instead of an umbrella.  The civilized man
+has no special use for cousins; and he may presently find that he has
+no special use for brothers and sisters.  The parent seems likely to
+remain indispensable; but there is no reason why that natural tie
+should be made the excuse for unnatural aggravations of it, as
+crushing to the parent as they are oppressive to the child.  The
+mother and father will not always have to shoulder the burthen of
+maintenance which should fall on the Atlas shoulders of the fatherland
+and motherland.  Pending such reforms and emancipations, a shattering
+break-up of the parental home must remain one of the normal incidents
+of marriage.  The parent is left lonely and the child is not.  Woe to
+the old if they have no impersonal interests, no convictions, no
+public causes to advance, no tastes or hobbies!  It is well to be a
+mother but not to be a mother-in-law; and if men were cut off
+artificially from intellectual and public interests as women are, the
+father-in-law would be as deplorable a figure in popular tradition as
+the mother-in-law.
+
+It is not to be wondered at that some people hold that blood
+relationship should be kept a secret from the persons related, and
+that the happiest condition in this respect is that of the foundling
+who, if he ever meets his parents or brothers or sisters, passes them
+by without knowing them.  And for such a view there is this to be
+said:  that our family system does unquestionably take the natural
+bond between members of the same family, which, like all natural
+bonds, is not too tight to be borne, and superimposes on it a painful
+burden of forced, inculcated, suggested, and altogether unnecessary
+affection and responsibility which we should do well to get rid of by
+making relatives as independent of one another as possible.
+
+
+
+The Fate of the Family
+
+The difficulty of inducing people to talk sensibly about the family is
+the same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume as confusing
+discussions of marriage.  Marriage is not a single invariable
+institution:  it changes from civilization to civilization, from
+religion to religion, from civil code to civil code, from frontier to
+frontier.  The family is still more variable, because the number of
+persons constituting a family, unlike the number of persons
+constituting a marriage, varies from one to twenty:  indeed, when a
+widower with a family marries a widow with a family, and the two
+produce a third family, even that very high number may be surpassed.
+And the conditions may vary between opposite extremes:  for example,
+in a London or Paris slum every child adds to the burden of poverty
+and helps to starve the parents and all the other children, whereas in
+a settlement of pioneer colonists every child, from the moment it is
+big enough to lend a hand to the family industry, is an investment in
+which the only danger is that of temporary over-capitalization.  Then
+there are the variations in family sentiment.  Sometimes the family
+organization is as frankly political as the organization of an army or
+an industry:  fathers being no more expected to be sentimental about
+their children than colonels about soldiers, or factory owners about
+their employees, though the mother may be allowed a little tenderness
+if her character is weak.  The Roman father was a despot:  the Chinese
+father is an object of worship:  the sentimental modern western father
+is often a play-fellow looked to for toys and pocket-money.  The
+farmer sees his children constantly:  the squire sees them only during
+the holidays, and not then oftener than he can help:  the tram
+conductor, when employed by a joint stock company, sometimes never
+sees them at all.
+
+Under such circumstances phrases like The Influence of Home Life, The
+Family, The Domestic Hearth, and so on, are no more specific than The
+Mammals, or The Man In The Street; and the pious generalizations
+founded so glibly on them by our sentimental moralists are unworkable.
+When households average twelve persons with the sexes about equally
+represented, the results may be fairly good.  When they average three
+the results may be very bad indeed; and to lump the two together under
+the general term The Family is to confuse the question hopelessly.
+The modern small family is much too stuffy:  children "brought up at
+home" in it are unfit for society.  But here again circumstances
+differ.  If the parents live in what is called a garden suburb, where
+there is a good deal of social intercourse, and the family, instead of
+keeping itself to itself, as the evil old saying is, and glowering at
+the neighbors over the blinds of the long street in which nobody knows
+his neighbor and everyone wishes to deceive him as to his income and
+social importance, is in effect broken up by school life, by
+out-of-door habits, and by frank neighborly intercourse through dances
+and concerts and theatricals and excursions and the like, families of
+four may turn out much less barbarous citizens than families of ten
+which attain the Boer ideal of being out of sight of one another's
+chimney smoke.
+
+All one can say is, roughly, that the homelier the home, and the more
+familiar the family, the worse for everybody concerned.  The family
+ideal is a humbug and a nuisance:  one might as reasonably talk of the
+barrack ideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any other substitution of
+the machinery of social organization for the end of it, which must
+always be the fullest and most capable life:  in short, the most godly
+life.  And this significant word reminds us that though the popular
+conception of heaven includes a Holy Family, it does not attach to
+that family the notion of a separate home, or a private nursery or
+kitchen or mother-in-law, or anything that constitutes the family as
+we know it.  Even blood relationship is miraculously abstracted from
+it; and the Father is the father of all children, the mother the
+mother of all mothers and babies, and the Son the Son of Man and the
+Savior of his brothers:  one whose chief utterance on the subject of
+the conventional family was an invitation to all of us to leave our
+families and follow him, and to leave the dead to bury the dead, and
+not debauch ourselves at that gloomy festival the family funeral, with
+its sequel of hideous mourning and grief which is either affected or
+morbid.
+
+
+
+Family Mourning
+
+I do not know how far this detestable custom of mourning is carried in
+France; but judging from the appearance of the French people I should
+say that a Frenchwoman goes into mourning for her cousins to the
+seventeenth degree.  The result is that when I cross the Channel I
+seem to have reached a country devastated by war or pestilence.  It is
+really suffering only from the family.  Will anyone pretend that
+England has not the best of this striking difference?  Yet it is such
+senseless and unnatural conventions as this that make us so impatient
+of what we call family feeling.  Even apart from its insufferable
+pretensions, the family needs hearty discrediting; for there is hardly
+any vulnerable part of it that could not be amputated with advantage.
+
+
+
+Art Teaching
+
+By art teaching I hasten to say that I do not mean giving children
+lessons in freehand drawing and perspective.  I am simply calling
+attention to the fact that fine art is the only teacher except
+torture.  I have already pointed out that nobody, except under threat
+of torture, can read a school book.  The reason is that a school book
+is not a work of art.  Similarly, you cannot listen to a lesson or a
+sermon unless the teacher or the preacher is an artist.  You cannot
+read the Bible if you have no sense of literary art.  The reason why
+the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so
+surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English
+version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions
+are comparatively artless.  To read a dull book; to listen to a
+tedious play or prosy sermon or lecture; to stare at uninteresting
+pictures or ugly buildings:  nothing, short of disease, is more
+dreadful than this.  The violence done to our souls by it leaves
+injuries and produces subtle maladies which have never been properly
+studied by psycho-pathologists.  Yet we are so inured to it in school,
+where practically all the teachers are bores trying to do the work of
+artists, and all the books artless, that we acquire a truly frightful
+power of enduring boredom.  We even acquire the notion that fine art
+is lascivious and destructive to the character.  In church, in the
+House of Commons, at public meetings, we sit solemnly listening to
+bores and twaddlers because from the time we could walk or speak we
+have been snubbed, scolded, bullied, beaten and imprisoned whenever we
+dared to resent being bored or twaddled at, or to express our natural
+impatience and derision of bores and twaddlers.  And when a man arises
+with a soul of sufficient native strength to break the bonds of this
+inculcated reverence and to expose and deride and tweak the noses of
+our humbugs and panjandrums, like Voltaire or Dickens, we are shocked
+and scandalized, even when we cannot help laughing.  Worse, we dread
+and persecute those who can see and declare the truth, because their
+sincerity and insight reflects on our delusion and blindness.  We are
+all like Nell Gwynne's footman, who defended Nell's reputation with
+his fists, not because he believed her to be what he called an honest
+woman, but because he objected to be scorned as the footman of one who
+was no better than she should be.
+
+This wretched power of allowing ourselves to be bored may seem to give
+the fine arts a chance sometimes.  People will sit through a
+performance of Beethoven's ninth symphony or of Wagner's Ring just as
+they will sit through a dull sermon or a front bench politician saying
+nothing for two hours whilst his unfortunate country is perishing
+through the delay of its business in Parliament.  But their endurance
+is very bad for the ninth symphony, because they never hiss when it is
+murdered.  I have heard an Italian conductor (no longer living) take
+the _adagio_ of that symphony at a lively _allegretto_, slowing down
+for the warmer major sections into the speed and manner of the
+heroine's death song in a Verdi opera; and the listeners, far from
+relieving my excruciation by rising with yells of fury and hurling
+their programs and opera glasses at the miscreant, behaved just as
+they do when Richter conducts it.  The mass of imposture that thrives
+on this combination of ignorance with despairing endurance is
+incalculable.  Given a public trained from childhood to stand anything
+tedious, and so saturated with school discipline that even with the
+doors open and no schoolmasters to stop them they will sit there
+helplessly until the end of the concert or opera gives them leave to
+go home; and you will have in great capitals hundreds of thousands of
+pounds spent every night in the season on professedly artistic
+entertainments which have no other effect on fine art than to
+exacerbate the hatred in which it is already secretly held in England.
+
+Fortunately, there are arts that cannot be cut off from the people by
+bad performances.  We can read books for ourselves; and we can play a
+good deal of fine music for ourselves with the help of a pianola.
+Nothing stands between us and the actual handwork of the great masters
+of painting except distance; and modern photographic methods of
+reproduction are in some cases quite and in many nearly as effective
+in conveying the artist's message as a modern edition of Shakespear's
+plays is in conveying the message that first existed in his
+handwriting.  The reproduction of great feats of musical execution is
+already on the way:  the phonograph, for all its wheezing and snarling
+and braying, is steadily improving in its manners; and what with this
+improvement on the one hand, and on the other that blessed selective
+faculty which enables us to ignore a good deal of disagreeable noise
+if there is a thread of music in the middle of it (few critics of the
+phonograph seem to be conscious of the very considerable mechanical
+noise set up by choirs and orchestras) we have at last reached a point
+at which, for example, a person living in an English village where the
+church music is the only music, and that music is made by a few
+well-intentioned ladies with the help of a harmonium, can hear masses
+by Palestrina very passably executed, and can thereby be led to the
+discovery that Jackson in F and Hymns Ancient and Modern are not
+perhaps the last word of beauty and propriety in the praise of God.
+
+In short, there is a vast body of art now within the reach of
+everybody.  The difficulty is that this art, which alone can educate
+us in grace of body and soul, and which alone can make the history of
+the past live for us or the hope of the future shine for us, which
+alone can give delicacy and nobility to our crude lusts, which is the
+appointed vehicle of inspiration and the method of the communion of
+saints, is actually branded as sinful among us because, wherever it
+arises, there is resistance to tyranny, breaking of fetters, and the
+breath of freedom.  The attempt to suppress art is not wholly
+successful:  we might as well try to suppress oxygen.  But it is
+carried far enough to inflict on huge numbers of people a most
+injurious art starvation, and to corrupt a great deal of the art that
+is tolerated.  You will find in England plenty of rich families with
+little more culture than their dogs and horses.  And you will find
+poor families, cut off by poverty and town life from the contemplation
+of the beauty of the earth, with its dresses of leaves, its scarves of
+cloud, and its contours of hill and valley, who would positively be
+happier as hogs, so little have they cultivated their humanity by the
+only effective instrument of culture:  art.  The dearth is
+artificially maintained even when there are the means of satisfying
+it.  Story books are forbidden, picture post cards are forbidden,
+theatres are forbidden, operas are forbidden, circuses are forbidden,
+sweetmeats are forbidden, pretty colors are forbidden, all exactly as
+vice is forbidden.  The Creator is explicitly prayed to, and
+implicitly convicted of indecency every day.  An association of vice
+and sin with everything that is delightful and of goodness with
+everything that is wretched and detestable is set up.  All the most
+perilous (and glorious) appetites and propensities are at once
+inflamed by starvation and uneducated by art.  All the wholesome
+conditions which art imposes on appetite are waived:  instead of
+cultivated men and women restrained by a thousand delicacies, repelled
+by ugliness, chilled by vulgarity, horrified by coarseness, deeply and
+sweetly moved by the graces that art has revealed to them and nursed
+in them, we get indiscrimmate rapacity in pursuit of pleasure and a
+parade of the grossest stimulations in catering for it.  We have a
+continual clamor for goodness, beauty, virtue, and sanctity, with such
+an appalling inability to recognize it or love it when it arrives that
+it is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote
+twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.  Do
+not for a moment suppose that uncultivated people are merely
+indifferent to high and noble qualities.  They hate them malignantly.
+At best, such qualities are like rare and beautiful birds:  when they
+appear the whole country takes down its guns; but the birds receive
+the statuary tribute of having their corpses stuffed.
+
+And it really all comes from the habit of preventing children from
+being troublesome.  You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing
+how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of
+Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much
+worse.  You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan
+are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody
+appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your
+parental protection.  You have not stifled a single passion nor
+averted a single danger:  you have depraved the passions by starving
+them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect
+children brought up in freedom.  You have men who imagine themselves
+to be ministers of religion openly declaring that when they pass
+through the streets they have to keep out in the wheeled traffic to
+avoid the temptations of the pavement.  You have them organizing hunts
+of the women who tempt them--poor creatures whom no artist would touch
+without a shudder--and wildly clamoring for more clothes to disguise
+and conceal the body, and for the abolition of pictures, statues,
+theatres, and pretty colors.  And incredible as it seems, these
+unhappy lunatics are left at large, unrebuked, even admired and
+revered, whilst artists have to struggle for toleration.  To them an
+undraped human body is the most monstrous, the most blighting, the
+most obscene, the most unbearable spectacle in the universe.  To an
+artist it is, at its best, the most admirable spectacle in nature,
+and, at its average, an object of indifference.  If every rag of
+clothing miraculously dropped from the inhabitants of London at noon
+tomorrow (say as a preliminary to the Great Judgment), the artistic
+people would not turn a hair; but the artless people would go mad and
+call on the mountains to hide them.  I submit that this indicates a
+thoroughly healthy state on the part of the artists, and a thoroughly
+morbid one on the part of the artless.  And the healthy state is
+attainable in a cold country like ours only by familiarity with the
+undraped figure acquired through pictures, statues, and theatrical
+representations in which an illusion of natural clotheslessness is
+produced and made poetic.
+
+In short, we all grow up stupid and mad to just the extent to which we
+have not been artistically educated; and the fact that this taint of
+stupidity and madness has to be tolerated because it is general, and
+is even boasted of as characteristically English, makes the situation
+all the worse.  It is becoming exceedingly grave at present, because
+the last ray of art is being cut off from our schools by the
+discontinuance of religious education.
+
+
+
+The Impossibility of Secular Education
+
+Now children must be taught some sort of religion.  Secular education
+is an impossibility.  Secular education comes to this:  that the only
+reason for ceasing to do evil and learning to do well is that if you
+do not you will be caned.  This is worse than being taught in a church
+school that if you become a dissenter you will go to hell; for hell is
+presented as the instrument of something eternal, divine, and
+inevitable:  you cannot evade it the moment the schoolmaster's back is
+turned.  What confuses this issue and leads even highly intelligent
+religious persons to advocate secular education as a means of rescuing
+children from the strife of rival proselytizers is the failure to
+distinguish between the child's personal subjective need for a
+religion and its right to an impartially communicated historical
+objective knowledge of all the creeds and Churches.  Just as a child,
+no matter what its race and color may be, should know that there are
+black men and brown men and yellow men, and, no matter what its
+political convictions may be, that there are Monarchists and
+Republicans and Positivists, Socialists and Unsocialists, so it should
+know that there are Christians and Mahometans and Buddhists and
+Shintoists and so forth, and that they are on the average just as
+honest and well-behaved as its own father.  For example, it should not
+be told that Allah is a false god set up by the Turks and Arabs, who
+will all be damned for taking that liberty; but it should be told that
+many English people think so, and that many Turks and Arabs think the
+converse about English people.  It should be taught that Allah is
+simply the name by which God is known to Turks and Arabs, who are just
+as eligible for salvation as any Christian.  Further, that the
+practical reason why a Turkish child should pray in a mosque and an
+English child in a church is that as worship is organized in Turkey in
+mosques in the name of Mahomet and in England in churches in the name
+of Christ, a Turkish child joining the Church of England or an English
+child following Mahomet will find that it has no place for its worship
+and no organization of its religion within its reach.  Any other
+teaching of the history and present facts of religion is false
+teaching, and is politically extremely dangerous in an empire in which
+a huge majority of the fellow subjects of the governing island do not
+profess the religion of that island.
+
+But this objectivity, though intellectually honest, tells the child
+only what other people believe.  What it should itself believe is
+quite another matter.  The sort of Rationalism which says to a child
+"You must suspend your judgment until you are old enough to choose
+your religion" is Rationalism gone mad.  The child must have a
+conscience and a code of honor (which is the essence of religion) even
+if it be only a provisional one, to be revised at its confirmation.
+For confirmation is meant to signalize a spiritual coming of age, and
+may be a repudiation.  Really active souls have many confirmations and
+repudiations as their life deepens and their knowledge widens.  But
+what is to guide the child before its first confirmation?  Not mere
+orders, because orders must have a sanction of some sort or why should
+the child obey them?  If, as a Secularist, you refuse to teach any
+sanction, you must say "You will be punished if you disobey."  "Yes,"
+says the child to itself, "if I am found out; but wait until your back
+is turned and I will do as I like, and lie about it."  There can be no
+objective punishment for successful fraud; and as no espionage can
+cover the whole range of a child's conduct, the upshot is that the
+child becomes a liar and schemer with an atrophied conscience.  And a
+good many of the orders given to it are not obeyed after all.  Thus
+the Secularist who is not a fool is forced to appeal to the child's
+vital impulse towards perfection, to the divine spark; and no
+resolution not to call this impulse an impulse of loyalty to the
+Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, or obedience to the Will of God, or any
+other standard theological term, can alter the fact that the
+Secularist has stepped outside Secularism and is educating the child
+religiously, even if he insists on repudiating that pious adverb and
+substituting the word metaphysically.
+
+
+
+Natural Selection as a Religion
+
+We must make up our minds to it therefore that whatever measures we
+may be forced to take to prevent the recruiting sergeants of the
+Churches, free or established, from obtaining an exclusive right of
+entry to schools, we shall not be able to exclude religion from them.
+The most horrible of all religions:  that which teaches us to regard
+ourselves as the helpless prey of a series of senseless accidents
+called Natural Selection, is allowed and even welcomed in so-called
+secular schools because it is, in a sense, the negation of all
+religion; but for school purposes a religion is a belief which affects
+conduct; and no belief affects conduct more radically and often so
+disastrously as the belief that the universe is a product of Natural
+Selection.  What is more, the theory of Natural Selection cannot be
+kept out of schools, because many of the natural facts that present
+the most plausible appearance of design can be accounted for by
+Natural Selection; and it would be so absurd to keep a child in
+delusive ignorance of so potent a factor in evolution as to keep it in
+ignorance of radiation or capillary attraction.  Even if you make a
+religion of Natural Selection, and teach the child to regard itself as
+the irresponsible prey of its circumstances and appetites (or its
+heredity as you will perhaps call them), you will none the less find
+that its appetites are stimulated by your encouragement and daunted by
+your discouragement; that one of its appetites is an appetite for
+perfection; that if you discourage this appetite and encourage the
+cruder acquisitive appetites the child will steal and lie and be a
+nuisance to you; and that if you encourage its appetite for perfection
+and teach it to attach a peculiar sacredness to it and place it before
+the other appetites, it will be a much nicer child and you will have a
+much easier job, at which point you will, in spite of your
+pseudoscientific jargon, find yourself back in the old-fashioned
+religious teaching as deep as Dr. Watts and in fact fathoms deeper.
+
+
+
+Moral Instruction Leagues
+
+And now the voices of our Moral Instruction Leagues will be lifted,
+asking whether there is any reason why the appetite for perfection
+should not be cultivated in rationally scientific terms instead of
+being associated with the story of Jonah and the great fish and the
+thousand other tales that grow up round religions.  Yes:  there are
+many reasons; and one of them is that children all like the story of
+Jonah and the whale (they insist on its being a whale in spite of
+demonstrations by Bible smashers without any sense of humor that Jonah
+would not have fitted into a whale's gullet--as if the story would be
+credible of a whale with an enlarged throat) and that no child on
+earth can stand moral instruction books or catechisms or any other
+statement of the case for religion in abstract terms.  The object of a
+moral instruction book is not to be rational, scientific, exact, proof
+against controversy, nor even credible:  its object is to make
+children good; and if it makes them sick instead its place is the
+waste-paper basket.
+
+Take for an illustration the story of Elisha and the bears.  To the
+authors of the moral instruction books it is in the last degree
+reprehensible.  It is obviously not true as a record of fact; and the
+picture it gives us of the temper of God (which is what interests an
+adult reader) is shocking and blasphemous.  But it is a capital story
+for a child.  It interests a child because it is about bears; and it
+leaves the child with an impression that children who poke fun at old
+gentlemen and make rude remarks about bald heads are not nice
+children, which is a highly desirable impression, and just as much as
+a child is capable of receiving from the story.  When a story is about
+God and a child, children take God for granted and criticize the
+child.  Adults do the opposite, and are thereby led to talk great
+nonsense about the bad effect of Bible stories on infants.
+
+But let no one think that a child or anyone else can learn religion
+from a teacher or a book or by any academic process whatever.  It is
+only by an unfettered access to the whole body of Fine Art:  that is,
+to the whole body of inspired revelation, that we can build up that
+conception of divinity to which all virtue is an aspiration.  And to
+hope to find this body of art purified from all that is obsolete or
+dangerous or fierce or lusty, or to pick and choose what will be good
+for any particular child, much less for all children, is the
+shallowest of vanities.  Such schoolmasterly selection is neither
+possible nor desirable.  Ignorance of evil is not virtue but
+imbecility:  admiring it is like giving a prize for honesty to a man
+who has not stolen your watch because he did not know you had one.
+Virtue chooses good from evil; and without knowledge there can be no
+choice.  And even this is a dangerous simplification of what actually
+occurs.  We are not choosing:  we are growing.  Were you to cut all of
+what you call the evil out of a child, it would drop dead.  If you try
+to stretch it to full human stature when it is ten years old, you will
+simply pull it into two pieces and be hanged.  And when you try to do
+this morally, which is what parents and schoolmasters are doing every
+day, you ought to be hanged; and some day, when we take a sensible
+view of the matter, you will be; and serve you right.  The child does
+not stand between a good and a bad angel:  what it has to deal with is
+a middling angel who, in normal healthy cases, wants to be a good
+angel as fast as it can without killing itself in the process, which
+is a dangerous one.
+
+Therefore there is no question of providing the child with a carefully
+regulated access to good art.  There is no good art, any more than
+there is good anything else in the absolute sense.  Art that is too
+good for the child will either teach it nothing or drive it mad, as
+the Bible has driven many people mad who might have kept their sanity
+had they been allowed to read much lower forms of literature.  The
+practical moral is that we must read whatever stories, see whatever
+pictures, hear whatever songs and symphonies, go to whatever plays we
+like.  We shall not like those which have nothing to say to us; and
+though everyone has a right to bias our choice, no one has a right to
+deprive us of it by keeping us from any work of art or any work of art
+from us.
+
+I may now say without danger of being misunderstood that the popular
+English compromise called Cowper Templeism (unsectarian Bible
+education) is not so silly as it looks.  It is true that the Bible
+inculcates half a dozen religions:  some of them barbarous; some
+cynical and pessimistic; some amoristic and romantic; some sceptical
+and challenging; some kindly, simple, and intuitional; some
+sophistical and intellectual; none suited to the character and
+conditions of western civilization unless it be the Christianity which
+was finally suppressed by the Crucifixion, and has never been put into
+practice by any State before or since.  But the Bible contains the
+ancient literature of a very remarkable Oriental race; and the
+imposition of this literature, on whatever false pretences, on our
+children left them more literate than if they knew no literature at
+all, which was the practical alternative.  And as our Authorized
+Version is a great work of art as well, to know it was better than
+knowing no art, which also was the practical alternative.  It is at
+least not a school book; and it is not a bad story book, horrible as
+some of the stories are.  Therefore as between the Bible and the blank
+represented by secular education, the choice is with the Bible.
+
+
+
+The Bible
+
+But the Bible is not sufficient.  The real Bible of modern Europe is
+the whole body of great literature in which the inspiration and
+revelation of Hebrew Scripture has been continued to the present day.
+Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zoroaster is less comforting to the ill and
+unhappy than the Psalms; but it is much truer, subtler, and more
+edifying.  The pleasure we get from the rhetoric of the book of Job
+and its tragic picture of a bewildered soul cannot disguise the
+ignoble irrelevance of the retort of God with which it closes, or
+supply the need of such modern revelations as Shelley's Prometheus or
+The Niblung's Ring of Richard Wagner.  There is nothing in the Bible
+greater in inspiration than Beethoven's ninth symphony; and the power
+of modern music to convey that inspiration to a modern man is far
+greater than that of Elizabethan English, which is, except for people
+steeped in the Bible from childhood like Sir Walter Scott and Ruskin,
+a dead language.
+
+Besides, many who have no ear for literature or for music are
+accessible to architecture, to pictures, to statues, to dresses, and
+to the arts of the stage.  Every device of art should be brought to
+bear on the young; so that they may discover some form of it that
+delights them naturally; for there will come to all of them that
+period between dawning adolescence and full maturity when the
+pleasures and emotions of art will have to satisfy cravings which, if
+starved or insulted, may become morbid and seek disgraceful
+satisfactions, and, if prematurely gratified otherwise than
+poetically, may destroy the stamina of the race.  And it must be borne
+in mind that the most dangerous art for this necessary purpose is the
+art that presents itself as religious ecstasy.  Young people are ripe
+for love long before they are ripe for religion.  Only a very foolish
+person would substitute the Imitation of Christ for Treasure Island as
+a present for a boy or girl, or for Byron's Don Juan as a present for
+a swain or lass.  Pickwick is the safest saint for us in our nonage.
+Flaubert's Temptation of St Anthony is an excellent book for a man of
+fifty, perhaps the best within reach as a healthy study of visionary
+ecstasy; but for the purposes of a boy of fifteen Ivanhoe and the
+Templar make a much better saint and devil.  And the boy of fifteen
+will find this out for himself if he is allowed to wander in a
+well-stocked literary garden, and hear bands and see pictures and
+spend his pennies on cinematograph shows.  His choice may often be
+rather disgusting to his elders when they want him to choose the best
+before he is ready for it.  The greatest Protestant Manifesto ever
+written, as far as I know, is Houston Chamberlain's Foundations of the
+Nineteenth Century:  everybody capable of it should read it.  Probably
+the History of Maria Monk is at the opposite extreme of merit (this is
+a guess:  I have never read it); but it is certain that a boy let
+loose in a library would go for Maria Monk and have no use whatever
+for Mr Chamberlain.  I should probably have read Maria Monk myself if
+I had not had the Arabian Nights and their like to occupy me better.
+In art, children, like adults, will find their level if they are left
+free to find it, and not restricted to what adults think good for
+them.  Just at present our young people are going mad over ragtimes,
+apparently because syncopated rhythms are new to them.  If they had
+learnt what can be done with syncopation from Beethoven's third
+Leonora overture, they would enjoy the ragtimes all the more; but they
+would put them in their proper place as amusing vulgarities.
+
+
+
+Artist Idolatry
+
+But there are more dangerous influences than ragtimes waiting for
+people brought up in ignorance of fine art.  Nothing is more pitiably
+ridiculous than the wild worship of artists by those who have never
+been seasoned in youth to the enchantments of art.  Tenors and prima
+donnas, pianists and violinists, actors and actresses enjoy powers of
+seduction which in the middle ages would have exposed them to the risk
+of being burnt for sorcery.  But as they exercise this power by
+singing, playing, and acting, no great harm is done except perhaps to
+themselves.  Far graver are the powers enjoyed by brilliant persons
+who are also connoisseurs in art.  The influence they can exercise on
+young people who have been brought up in the darkness and wretchedness
+of a home without art, and in whom a natural bent towards art has
+always been baffled and snubbed, is incredible to those who have not
+witnessed and understood it.  He (or she) who reveals the world of art
+to them opens heaven to them.  They become satellites, disciples,
+worshippers of the apostle.  Now the apostle may be a voluptuary
+without much conscience.  Nature may have given him enough virtue to
+suffice in a reasonable environment.  But this allowance may not be
+enough to defend him against the temptation and demoralization of
+finding himself a little god on the strength of what ought to be a
+quite ordinary culture.  He may find adorers in all directions in our
+uncultivated society among people of stronger character than himself,
+not one of whom, if they had been artistically educated, would have
+had anything to learn from him or regarded him as in any way
+extraordinary apart from his actual achievements as an artist.
+Tartuffe is not always a priest.  Indeed he is not always a rascal:
+he is often a weak man absurdly credited with omniscience and
+perfection, and taking unfair advantages only because they are offered
+to him and he is too weak to refuse.  Give everyone his culture, and
+no one will offer him more than his due.
+
+In thus delivering our children from the idolatry of the artist, we
+shall not destroy for them the enchantment of art:  on the contrary,
+we shall teach them to demand art everywhere as a condition attainable
+by cultivating the body, mind, and heart.  Art, said Morris, is the
+expression of pleasure in work.  And certainly, when work is made
+detestable by slavery, there is no art.  It is only when learning is
+made a slavery by tyrannical teachers that art becomes loathsome to
+the pupil.
+
+
+
+"The Machine"
+
+When we set to work at a Constitution to secure freedom for children,
+we had better bear in mind that the children may not be at all obliged
+to us for our pains.  Rousseau said that men are born free; and this
+saying, in its proper bearings, was and is a great and true saying;
+yet let it not lead us into the error of supposing that all men long
+for freedom and embrace it when it is offered to them.  On the
+contrary, it has to be forced on them; and even then they will give it
+the slip if it is not religiously inculcated and strongly safeguarded.
+
+Besides, men are born docile, and must in the nature of things remain
+so with regard to everything they do not understand.  Now political
+science and the art of govemment are among the things they do not
+understand, and indeed are not at present allowed to understand.  They
+can be enslaved by a system, as we are at present, because it happens
+to be there, and nobody understands it.  An intelligently worked
+Capitalist system, as Comte saw, would give us all that most of us are
+intelligent enough to want.  What makes it produce such unspeakably
+vile results is that it is an automatic system which is as little
+understood by those who profit by it in money as by those who are
+starved and degraded by it:  our millionaires and statesmen are
+manifestly no more "captains of industry" or scientific politicians
+than our bookmakers are mathematicians.  For some time past a
+significant word has been coming into use as a substitute for Destiny,
+Fate, and Providence.  It is "The Machine":  the machine that has no
+god in it.  Why do governments do nothing in spite of reports of Royal
+Commissions that establish the most frightful urgency?  Why do our
+philanthropic millionaires do nothing, though they are ready to throw
+bucketfuls of gold into the streets?  The Machine will not let them.
+Always the Machine.  In short, they dont know how.
+
+They try to reform Society as an old lady might try to restore a
+broken down locomotive by prodding it with a knitting needle.  And
+this is not at all because they are born fools, but because they have
+been educated, not into manhood and freedom, but into blindness and
+slavery by their parents and schoolmasters, themselves the victims of
+a similar misdirection, and consequently of The Machine.  They do not
+want liberty.  They have not been educated to want it.  They choose
+slavery and inequality; and all the other evils are automatically
+added to them.
+
+And yet we must have The Machine.  It is only in unskilled hands under
+ignorant direction that machinery is dangerous.  We can no more govern
+modern communities without political machinery than we can feed and
+clothe them without industrial machinery.  Shatter The Machine, and
+you get Anarchy.  And yet The Machine works so detestably at present
+that we have people who advocate Anarchy and call themselves
+Anarchists.
+
+
+
+The Provocation to Anarchism
+
+What is valid in Anarchism is that all Governments try to simplify
+their task by destroying liberty and glorifying authority in general
+and their own deeds in particular.  But the difficulty in combining
+law and order with free institutions is not a natural one.  It is a
+matter of inculcation.  If people are brought up to be slaves, it is
+useless and dangerous to let them loose at the age of twenty-one and
+say "Now you are free."  No one with the tamed soul and broken spirit
+of a slave can be free.  It is like saying to a laborer brought up on
+a family income of thirteen shillings a week, "Here is one hundred
+thousand pounds:  now you are wealthy."  Nothing can make such a man
+really wealthy.  Freedom and wealth are difficult and responsible
+conditions to which men must be accustomed and socially trained from
+birth.  A nation that is free at twenty-one is not free at all; just
+as a man first enriched at fifty remains poor all his life, even if he
+does not curtail it by drinking himself to death in the first wild
+ecstasy of being able to swallow as much as he likes for the first
+time.  You cannot govern men brought up as slaves otherwise than as
+slaves are governed.  You may pile Bills of Right and Habeas Corpus
+Acts on Great Charters; promulgate American Constitutions; burn the
+chateaux and guillotine the seigneurs; chop off the heads of kings and
+queens and set up Democracy on the ruins of feudalism:  the end of it
+all for us is that already in the twentieth century there has been as
+much brute coercion and savage intolerance, as much flogging and
+hanging, as much impudent injustice on the bench and lustful rancor in
+the pulpit, as much naive resort to torture, persecution, and
+suppression of free speech and freedom of the press, as much war, as
+much of the vilest excess of mutilation, rapine, and delirious
+indiscriminate slaughter of helpless non-combatants, old and young, as
+much prostitution of professional talent, literary and political, in
+defence of manifest wrong, as much cowardly sycophancy giving fine
+names to all this villainy or pretending that it is "greatly
+exaggerated," as we can find any record of from the days when the
+advocacy of liberty was a capital offence and Democracy was hardly
+thinkable.  Democracy exhibits the vanity of Louis XIV, the savagery
+of Peter of Russia, the nepotism and provinciality of Napoleon, the
+fickleness of Catherine II:  in short, all the childishnesses of all
+the despots without any of the qualities that enabled the greatest of
+them to fascinate and dominate their contemporaries.
+
+And the flatterers of Democracy are as impudently servile to the
+successful, and insolent to common honest folk, as the flatterers of
+the monarchs.  Democracy in America has led to the withdrawal of
+ordinary refined persons from politics; and the same result is coming
+in England as fast as we make Democracy as democratic as it is in
+America.  This is true also of popular religion:  it is so horribly
+irreligious that nobody with the smallest pretence to culture, or the
+least inkling of what the great prophets vainly tried to make the
+world understand, will have anything to do with it except for purely
+secular reasons.
+
+
+
+Imagination
+
+Before we can clearly understand how baleful is this condition of
+intimidation in which we live, it is necessary to clear up the
+confusion made by our use of the word imagination to denote two very
+different powers of mind.  One is the power to imagine things as they
+are not:  this I call the romantic imagination.  The other is the
+power to imagine things as they are without actually sensing them; and
+this I will call the realistic imagination.  Take for example marriage
+and war.  One man has a vision of perpetual bliss with a domestic
+angel at home, and of flashing sabres, thundering guns, victorious
+cavalry charges, and routed enemies in the field.  That is romantic
+imagination; and the mischief it does is incalculable.  It begins in
+silly and selfish expectations of the impossible, and ends in spiteful
+disappointment, sour grievance, cynicism, and misanthropic resistance
+to any attempt to better a hopeless world.  The wise man knows that
+imagination is not only a means of pleasing himself and beguiling
+tedious hours with romances and fairy tales and fools' paradises (a
+quite defensible and delightful amusement when you know exactly what
+you are doing and where fancy ends and facts begin), but also a means
+of foreseeing and being prepared for realities as yet unexperienced,
+and of testing the possibility and desirability of serious Utopias.
+He does not expect his wife to be an angel; nor does he overlook the
+facts that war depends on the rousing of all the murderous
+blackguardism still latent in mankind; that every victory means a
+defeat; that fatigue, hunger, terror, and disease are the raw material
+which romancers work up into military glory; and that soldiers for the
+most part go to war as children go to school, because they are afraid
+not to.  They are afraid even to say they are afraid, as such candor
+is punishable by death in the military code.
+
+A very little realistic imagination gives an ambitious person enormous
+power over the multitudinous victims of the romantic imagination.  For
+the romancer not only pleases himself with fictitious glories:  he
+also terrifies himself with imaginary dangers.  He does not even
+picture what these dangers are:  he conceives the unknown as always
+dangerous.  When you say to a realist "You must do this" or "You must
+not do that," he instantly asks what will happen to him if he does (or
+does not, as the case may be).  Failing an unromantic convincing
+answer, he does just as he pleases unless he can find for himself a
+real reason for refraining.  In short, though you can intimidate him,
+you cannot bluff him.  But you can always bluff the romantic person:
+indeed his grasp of real considerations is so feeble that you find it
+necessary to bluff him even when you have solid considerations to
+offer him instead.  The campaigns of Napoleon, with their atmosphere
+of glory, illustrate this.  In the Russian campaign Napoleon's
+marshals achieved miracles of bluff, especially Ney, who, with a
+handful of men, monstrously outnumbered, repeatedly kept the Russian
+troops paralyzed with terror by pure bounce.  Napoleon himself, much
+more a realist than Ney (that was why he dominated him), would
+probably have surrendered; for sometimes the bravest of the brave will
+achieve successes never attempted by the cleverest of the clever.
+Wellington was a completer realist than Napoleon.  It was impossible
+to persuade Wellington that he was beaten until he actually was
+beaten.  He was unbluffable; and if Napoleon had understood the nature
+of Wellington's strength instead of returning Wellington's snobbish
+contempt for him by an academic contempt for Wellington, he would not
+have left the attack at Waterloo to Ney and D'Erlon, who, on that
+field, did not know when they were beaten, whereas Wellington knew
+precisely when he was not beaten.  The unbluffable would have
+triumphed anyhow, probably, because Napoleon was an academic soldier,
+doing the academic thing (the attack in columns and so forth) with
+superlative ability and energy; whilst Wellington was an original
+soldier who, instead of outdoing the terrible academic columns with
+still more terrible and academic columns, outwitted them with the thin
+red line, not of heroes, but, as this uncompromising realist never
+hesitated to testify, of the scum of the earth.
+
+
+
+Government by Bullies
+
+These picturesque martial incidents are being reproduced every day in
+our ordinary life.  We are bluffed by hardy simpletons and headstrong
+bounders as the Russians were bluffed by Ney; and our Wellingtons are
+threadbound by slave-democracy as Gulliver was threadbound by the
+Lilliputians.  We are a mass of people living in a submissive routine
+to which we have been drilled from our childhood.  When you ask us to
+take the simplest step outside that routine, we say shyly, "Oh, I
+really couldnt," or "Oh, I shouldnt like to," without being able to
+point out the smallest harm that could possibly ensue:  victims, not
+of a rational fear of real dangers, but of pure abstract fear, the
+quintessence of cowardice, the very negation of "the fear of God."
+Dotted about among us are a few spirits relatively free from this
+inculcated paralysis, sometimes because they are half-witted,
+sometimes because they are unscrupulously selfish, sometimes because
+they are realists as to money and unimaginative as to other things,
+sometimes even because they are exceptionally able, but always because
+they are not afraid of shadows nor oppressed with nightmares.  And we
+see these few rising as if by magic into power and affluence, and
+forming, with the millionaires who have accidentally gained huge
+riches by the occasional windfalls of our commerce, the governing
+class.  Now nothing is more disastrous than a governing class that
+does not know how to govern.  And how can this rabble of the casual
+products of luck, cunning, and folly, be expected to know how to
+govern?  The merely lucky ones and the hereditary ones do not owe
+their position to their qualifications at all.  As to the rest, the
+realism which seems their essential qualification often consists not
+only in a lack of romantic imagination, which lack is a merit, but of
+the realistic, constructive, Utopian imagination, which lack is a
+ghastly defect.  Freedom from imaginative illusion is therefore no
+guarantee whatever of nobility of character:  that is why inculcated
+submissiveness makes us slaves to people much worse than ourselves,
+and why it is so important that submissiveness should no longer be
+inculcated.
+
+And yet as long as you have the compulsory school as we know it, we
+shall have submissiveness inculcated.  What is more, until the active
+hours of child life are organized separately from the active hours of
+adult life, so that adults can enjoy the society of children in reason
+without being tormented, disturbed, harried, burdened, and hindered in
+their work by them as they would be now if there were no compulsory
+schools and no children hypnotized into the belief that they must
+tamely go to them and be imprisoned and beaten and over-tasked in
+them, we shall have schools under one pretext or another; and we shall
+have all the evil consequences and all the social hopelessness that
+result from turning a nation of potential freemen and freewomen into a
+nation of two-legged spoilt spaniels with everything crushed out of
+their nature except dread of the whip.  Liberty is the breath of life
+to nations; and liberty is the one thing that parents, schoolmasters,
+and rulers spend their lives in extirpating for the sake of an
+immediately quiet and finally disastrous life.
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of A Treatise on Parents and Children
+
+
+
+
+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".
+
+
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