A Treatise on Parents and Children
by
George Bernard Shaw
Part 1 out of 2
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
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