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will probably be superseded in half that time by an improved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," "Don't 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 don't understand and don't 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 don't know what
is the matter with you; and I can't 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 don't 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 don't agree with
us. I am sufficient of an Athanasian to advocate a law for the speedy
execution of all Athanasians, because they violate the fundamental
proposition of my creed, which is, I repeat, that all living creatures are
experiments. The precise formula for the Superman, _ci-devant_ The Just Man
Made Perfect, has not yet been discovered. Until it is, every birth is
an experiment in the Great Research which is being conducted by the
Life Force to discover that formula.
The Experiment Experimenting
And now all the modern schoolmaster abortionists will rise up
beaming, and say, "We quite agree. We regard every child in our school
as a subject for experiment. We are always experimenting with
them. We challenge the experimental test for our system. We are
continually guided by our experience in our great work of moulding the
character of our future citizens, etc. etc. etc." I am sorry to
seem irreconcilable; but it is the Life Force that has to make
the experiment and not the schoolmaster; and the Life Force for
the child's purpose is in the child and not in the schoolmaster.
The schoolmaster is another experiment; and a laboratory in which all
the experiments began experimenting on one another would not
produce intelligible results. I admit, however, that if my
schoolmasters had treated me as an experiment of the Life Force: that
is, if they had set me free to do as I liked subject only to my political
rights and theirs, they could not have watched the experiment very long,
because the first result would have been a rapid movement on my part in
the direction of the door, and my disappearance there-through.
It may be worth inquiring where I should have gone to. I should
say that practically every time I should have gone to a much
more educational place. I should have gone into the country, or into
the sea, or into the National Gallery, or to hear a band if there was
one, or to any library where there were no schoolbooks. I should have
read very dry and difficult books: for example, though nothing would
have induced me to read the budget of stupid party lies that served as
a text-book of history in school, I remember reading Robertson's
Charles V. and his history of Scotland from end to end most
laboriously. Once, stung by the airs of a schoolfellow who alleged that he
had read Locke On The Human Understanding, I attempted to read the
Bible straight through, and actually got to the Pauline Epistles before
I broke down in disgust at what seemed to me their inveterate crookedness
of mind. If there had been a school where children were really free, I
should have had to be driven out of it for the sake of my health by the
teachers; for the children to whom a literary education can be of any use are
insatiable: they will read and study far more than is good for
them. In fact the real difficulty is to prevent them from wasting their
time by reading for the sake of reading and studying for the sake of
studying, instead of taking some trouble to find out what they really like
and are capable of doing some good at. Some silly person will probably
interrupt me here with the remark that many children have no appetite for a
literary education at all, and would never open a book if they were not
forced to. I have known many such persons who have been forced to the
point of obtaining University degrees. And for all the effect
their literary exercises has left on them they might just as well have
been put on the treadmill. In fact they are actually less literate
than the treadmill would have left them; for they might by chance
have picked up and dipped into a volume of Shakespear or a translation
of Homer if they had not been driven to loathe every famous name
in literature. I should probably know as much Latin as French, if
Latin had not been made the excuse for my school imprisonment
and degradation.
Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport
If we are to discuss the importance of art, learning, and
intellectual culture, the first thing we have to recognize is that we have
very little of them at present; and that this little has not been
produced by compulsory education: nay, that the scarcity is unnatural
and has been produced by the violent exclusion of art and artists
from schools. On the other hand we have quite a considerable degree
of bodily culture: indeed there is a continual outcry against
the sacrifice of mental accomplishments to athletics. In other words
a sacrifice of the professed object of compulsory education to the
real object of voluntary education. It is assumed that this means
that people prefer bodily to mental culture; but may it not mean that
they prefer liberty and satisfaction to coercion and privation. Why is
it that people who have been taught Shakespear as a school subject
loathe his plays and cannot by any means be persuaded ever to open his
works after they escape from school, whereas there is still, 300 years
after his death, a wide and steady sale for his works to people who read
his plays as plays, and not as task work? If Shakespear, or for
that matter, Newton and Leibnitz, are allowed to find their readers
and students they will find them. If their works are annotated
and paraphrased by dullards, and the annotations and paraphrases forced
on all young people by imprisonment and flogging and scolding, there
will not be a single man of letters or higher mathematician the more in
the country: on the contrary there will be less, as so many
potential lovers of literature and mathematics will have been
incurably prejudiced against them. Everyone who is conversant with the
class in which child imprisonment and compulsory schooling is carried out
to the final extremity of the university degree knows that its
scholastic culture is a sham; that it knows little about literature or art
and a great deal about point-to-point races; and that the village
cobbler, who has never read a page of Plato, and is admittedly a
dangerously ignorant man politically, is nevertheless a Socrates compared to
the classically educated gentlemen who discuss politics in country
houses at election time (and at no other time) after their day's earnest
and skilful shooting. Think of the years and years of weary torment
the women of the piano-possessing class have been forced to spend over
the keyboard, fingering scales. How many of them could be bribed
to attend a pianoforte recital by a great player, though they will
rise from sick beds rather than miss Ascot or Goodwood?
Another familiar fact that teaches the same lesson is that many
women who have voluntarily attained a high degree of culture cannot add
up their own housekeeping books, though their education in
simple arithmetic was compulsory, whereas their higher education has
been wholly voluntary. Everywhere we find the same result.
The imprisonment, the beating, the taming and laming, the breaking
of young spirits, the arrest of development, the atrophy of all inhibitive
power except the power of fear, are real: the education is sham.
Those who have been taught most know least.
Antichrist
Among the worst effects of the unnatural segregation of children
in schools and the equally unnatural constant association of them
with adults in the family is the utter defeat of the vital element
in Christianity. Christ stands in the world for that intuition of
the highest humanity that we, being members one of another, must
not complain, must not scold, must not strike, nor revile nor
persecute nor revenge nor punish. Now family life and school life are,
as far as the moral training of children is concerned, nothing but
the deliberate inculcation of a routine of complaint,
scolding, punishment, persecution, and revenge as the natural and only
possible way of dealing with evil or inconvenience. "Aint nobody to be
whopped for this here?" exclaimed Sam Weller when he saw his employer's
name written up on a stage coach, and conceived the phenomenon as an
insult which reflected on himself. This exclamation of Sam Weller is at
once the negation of Christianity and the beginning and the end of
current morality; and so it will remain as long as the family and the
school persist as we know them: that is, as long as the rights of
children are so utterly denied that nobody will even take the trouble
to ascertain what they are, and coming of age is like the turning of
a convict into the street after twenty-one years penal servitude. Indeed
it is worse; for the convict may have learnt before his conviction how to
live in freedom and may remember how to set about it, however lamed his
powers of freedom may have become through disuse; but the child knows no
other way of life but the slave's way. Born free, as Rousseau says, he has
been laid hands on by slaves from the moment of his birth and brought up as a
slave. How is he, when he is at last set free, to be anything else than
the slave he actually is, clamoring for war, for the lash, for police,
prisons, and scaffolds in a wild panic of delusion that without these things
he is lost. The grown-up Englishman is to the end of his days a
badly brought-up child, beyond belief quarrelsome, petulant,
selfish, destructive, and cowardly: afraid that the Germans will come
and enslave him; that the burglar will come and rob him; that the
bicycle or motor car will run over him; that the smallpox will attack him;
and that the devil will run away with him and empty him out like a sack
of coals on a blazing fire unless his nurse or his parents or
his schoolmaster or his bishop or his judge or his army or his navy
will do something to frighten these bad things away. And this
Englishman, without the moral courage of a louse, will risk his neck for fun
fifty times every winter in the hunting field, and at Badajos sieges and
the like will ram his head into a hole bristling with sword blades
rather than be beaten in the one department in which he has been brought
up to consult his own honor. As a Sportsman (and war is
fundamentally the sport of hunting and fighting the most dangerous of the
beasts of prey) he feels free. He will tell you himself that the true
sportsman is never a snob, a coward, a duffer, a cheat, a thief, or a
liar. Curious, is it not, that he has not the same confidence in other
sorts of man?
And even sport is losing its freedom. Soon everybody will
be schooled, mentally and physically, from the cradle to the end of
the term of adult compulsory military service, and finally of
compulsory civil service lasting until the age of superannuation.
Always more schooling, more compulsion. We are to be cured by an excess
of the dose that has poisoned us. Satan is to cast out Satan.
Under the Whip
Clearly this will not do. We must reconcile education with
liberty. We must find out some means of making men workers and, if need
be, warriors, without making them slaves. We must cultivate the
noble virtues that have their root in pride. Now no schoolmaster will
teach these any more than a prison governor will teach his prisoners how
to mutiny and escape. Self-preservation forces him to break the
spirit that revolts against him, and to inculcate submission, even to
obscene assault, as a duty. A bishop once had the hardihood to say that
he would rather see England free than England sober. Nobody has
yet dared to say that he would rather see an England of ignoramuses
than an England of cowards and slaves. And if anyone did, it would
be necessary to point out that the antithesis is not a practical one,
as we have got at present an England of ignoramuses who are also
cowards and slaves, and extremely proud of it at that, because in school
they are taught to submit, with what they ridiculously call
Oriental fatalism (as if any Oriental has ever submitted more helplessly
and sheepishly to robbery and oppression than we Occidentals do), to
be driven day after day into compounds and set to the tasks they loathe by
the men they hate and fear, as if this were the inevitable destiny of
mankind. And naturally, when they grow up, they helplessly exchange the
prison of the school for the prison of the mine or the workshop or the
office, and drudge along stupidly and miserably, with just enough gregarious
instinct to turn furiously on any intelligent person who proposes a
change. It would be quite easy to make England a paradise, according to
our present ideas, in a few years. There is no mystery about it:
the way has been pointed out over and over again. The difficulty is not
the way but the will. And we have no will because the first thing done
with us in childhood was to break our will. Can anything be more
disgusting than the spectacle of a nation reading the biography of Gladstone
and gloating over the account of how he was flogged at Eton, two of his
schoolfellows being compelled to hold him down whilst he was flogged.
Not long ago a public body in England had to deal with the case of a
schoolmaster who, conceiving himself insulted by the smoking of a cigaret
against his orders by a pupil eighteen years old, proposed to flog
him publicly as a satisfaction to what he called his honor and
authority. I had intended to give the particulars of this ease, but find
the drudgery of repeating such stuff too sickening, and the effect
unjust to a man who was doing only what others all over the country
were doing as part of the established routine of what is called
education. The astounding part of it was the manner in which the person to
whom this outrage on decency seemed quite proper and natural claimed to
be a functionary of high character, and had his claim allowed. In
Japan he would hardly have been allowed the privilege of committing
suicide. What is to be said of a profession in which such obscenities are
made points of honor, or of institutions in which they are an accepted
part of the daily routine? Wholesome people would not argue about
the taste of such nastinesses: they would spit them out; but we
are tainted with flagellomania from our childhood. When will we
realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything,
however disgusting at first, makes it necessary for us to examine
carefully everything we have become accustomed to? Before motor cars
became common, necessity had accustomed us to a foulness in our streets
which would have horrified us had the street been our drawing-room
carpet. Before long we shall be as particular about our streets as we now
are about our carpets; and their condition in the nineteenth century
will become as forgotten and incredible as the condition of the
corridors of palaces and the courts of castles was as late as the
eighteenth century. This foulness, we can plead, was imposed on us as
a necessity by the use of horses and of huge retinues; but flogging
has never been so imposed: it has always been a vice, craved for on
any pretext by those depraved by it. Boys were flogged when
criminals were hanged, to impress the awful warning on them. Boys were
flogged at boundaries, to impress the boundaries on their memory.
Other methods and other punishments were always available: the choice
of this one betrayed the sensual impulse which makes the practice
an abomination. But when its viciousness made it customary, it
was practised and tolerated on all hands by people who were innocent
of anything worse than stupidity, ill temper, and inability to
discover other methods of maintaining order than those they had always
seen practised and approved of. From children and animals it extended
to slaves and criminals. In the days of Moses it was limited to
39 lashes. In the early nineteenth century it had become an
open madness: soldiers were sentenced to a thousand lashes for
trifling offences, with the result (among others less mentionable) that
the Iron Duke of Wellington complained that it was impossible to get
an order obeyed in the British army except in two or three
crack regiments. Such frantic excesses of this disgusting neurosis
provoked a reaction against it; but the clamor for it by depraved persons
never ceased, and was tolerated by a nation trained to it from childhood
in the schools until last year (1913), when in what must be described as a
paroxysm of sexual excitement provoked by the agitation concerning the White
Slave Traffic (the purely commercial nature of which I was prevented from
exposing on the stage by the Censorship twenty years ago) the Government
yielded to an outcry for flagellation led by the Archbishop of Canterbury,
and passed an Act under which a judge can sentence a man to be flogged to the
utmost extremity with any instrument usable for such a purpose that he cares
to prescribe. Such an Act is not a legislative phenomenon but a
psychopathic one. Its effect on the White Slave Traffic was, of course,
to distract public attention from its real cause and from the people who
really profit by it to imaginary "foreign scoundrels," and to secure a
monopoly of its organization for women.
And all this evil is made possible by the schoolmaster with his cane and
birch, by the parents getting rid as best they can of the nuisance of
children making noise and mischief in the house, and by the denial to
children of the elementary rights of human beings.
The first man who enslaved and "broke in" an animal with a whip
would have invented the explosion engine instead could he have foreseen
the curse he was laying on his race. For men and women learnt thereby
to enslave and break in their children by the same means.
These children, grown up, knew no other methods of training. Finally
the evil that was done for gain by the greedy was refined on and done
for pleasure by the lustful. Flogging has become a pleasure
purchasable in our streets, and inhibition a grown-up habit that children
play at. "Go and see what baby is doing; and tell him he mustnt" is the
last word of the nursery; and the grimmest aspect of it is that it
was first formulated by a comic paper as a capital joke.
Technical Instruction
Technical instruction tempts to violence (as a short cut) more
than liberal education. The sailor in Mr Rudyard Kipling's
Captains Courageous, teaching the boy the names of the ship's tackle with
a rope's end, does not disgust us as our schoolmasters do, especially
as the boy was a spoiled boy. But an unspoiled boy would not have
needed that drastic medicine. Technical training may be as tedious
as learning to skate or to play the piano or violin; but it is the
price one must pay to achieve certain desirable results or necessary
ends. It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek
or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic
for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true;
for there is no labor that might not be imposed on a child or an adult
on the same pretext; but as a glance at the average products of our public
school and university education shews that it is not true, it need not
trouble us. But it is a fact that ignorance of Latin and Greek and
mathematics closes certain careers to men (I do not mean artificial,
unnecessary, noxious careers like those of the
commercial schoolmaster). Languages, even dead ones, have their uses;
and, as it seems to many of us, mathematics have their uses. They will
always be learned by people who want to learn them; and people will always
want to learn them as long as they are of any importance in life:
indeed the want will survive their importance: superstition is
nowhere stronger than in the field of obsolete acquirements. And they
will never be learnt fruitfully by people who do not want to learn
them either for their own sake or for use in necessary work. There is
no harder schoolmaster than experience; and yet experience fails to
teach where there is no desire to learn.
Still, one must not begin to apply this generalization too early.
And this brings me to an important factor in the case: the factor
of evolution.
Docility and Dependence
If anyone, impressed by my view that the rights of a child are precisely
those of an adult, proceeds to treat a child as if it were an adult, he (or
she) will find that though the plan will work much better at some points than
the usual plan, at others it will not work at all; and this discovery may
provoke him to turn back from the whole conception of children's rights with
a jest at the expense of bachelors' and old maids' children. In dealing
with children what is needed is not logic but sense. There is no
logical reason why young persons should be allowed greater control of their
property the day after they are twenty-one than the day before it.
There is no logical reason why I, who strongly object to an adult standing
over a boy of ten with a Latin grammar, and saying, "you must learn this,
whether you want to or not," should nevertheless be quite prepared to
stand over a boy of five with the multiplication table or a copy book or
a code of elementary good manners, and practice on his docility to
make him learn them. And there is no logical reason why I should do for
a child a great many little offices, some of them troublesome
and disagreeable, which I should not do for a boy twice its age,
or support a boy or girl when I would unhesitatingly throw an adult on his
own resources. But there are practical reasons, and sensible reasons,
and affectionate reasons for all these illogicalities. Children do not want
to be treated altogether as adults: such treatment terrifies them and
over-burdens them with responsibility. In truth, very few adults care to be
called on for independence and originality: they also are bewildered
and terrified in the absence of precedents and precepts and commandments; but
modern Democracy allows them a sanctioning and cancelling power if they are
capable of using it, which children are not. To treat a child wholly as
an adult would be to mock and destroy it. Infantile docility and
juvenile dependence are, like death, a product of Natural Selection; and
though there is no viler crime than to abuse them, yet there is no greater
cruelty than to ignore them. I have complained sufficiently of what
I suffered through the process of assault, imprisonment, and
compulsory lessons that taught me nothing, which are called my
schooling. But I could say a good deal also about the things I was not
taught and should have been taught, not to mention the things I was allowed
to do which I should not have been allowed to do. I have no
recollection of being taught to read or write; so I presume I was born with
both faculties; but many people seem to have bitter recollections of
being forced reluctantly to acquire them. And though I have the
uttermost contempt for a teacher so ill mannered and incompetent as to be
unable to make a child learn to read and write without also making it
cry, still I am prepared to admit that I had rather have been compelled
to learn to read and write with tears by an incompetent and ill
mannered person than left in ignorance. Reading, writing, and
enough arithmetic to use money honestly and accurately, together with
the rudiments of law and order, become necessary conditions of a
child's liberty before it can appreciate the importance of its liberty,
or foresee that these accomplishments are worth acquiring. Nature
has provided for this by evolving the instinct of docility. Children
are very docile: they have a sound intuition that they must do what
they are told or perish. And adults have an intuition, equally sound,
that they must take advantage of this docility to teach children how
to live properly or the children will not survive. The difficulty is
to know where to stop. To illustrate this, let us consider the
main danger of childish docility and parental officiousness.
The Abuse of Docility
Docility may survive as a lazy habit long after it has ceased to be
a beneficial instinct. If you catch a child when it is young enough
to be instinctively docile, and keep it in a condition of
unremitted tutelage under the nurserymaid, the governess, the preparatory
school, the secondary school, and the university, until it is an adult,
you will produce, not a self-reliant, free, fully matured human being,
but a grown-up schoolboy or schoolgirl, capable of nothing in the way
of original or independent action except outbursts of naughtiness in
the women and blackguardism in the men. That is exactly what we get
at present in our rich and consequently governing classes: they
pass from juvenility to senility without ever touching maturity except
in body. The classes which cannot afford this sustained tutelage
are notably more self-reliant and grown-up: an office boy of fifteen
is often more of a man than a university student of twenty. Unfortunately
this precocity is disabled by poverty, ignorance, narrowness, and a hideous
power of living without art or love or beauty and being rather proud of
it. The poor never escape from servitude: their docility is
preserved by their slavery. And so all become the prey of the greedy,
the selfish, the domineering, the unscrupulous, the predatory. If here
and there an individual refuses to be docile, ten docile persons will beat
him or lock him up or shoot him or hang him at the bidding of his oppressors
and their own. The crux of the whole difficulty about parents,
schoolmasters, priests, absolute monarchs, and despots of every sort, is the
tendency to abuse natural docility. A nation should always be healthily
rebellious; but the king or prime minister has yet to be found who will make
trouble by cultivating that side of the national spirit. A child should
begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself more and more not only
in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and conduct; yet
as nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppish child, it
is useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcate
this uppishness. Such unamiable precepts as Always contradict
an authoritative statement, Always return a blow, Never lose a chance of a
good fight, When you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who scolds you
whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose, and follow the question
with a blow or an insult or some other unmistakable expression of resentment,
Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than
your elders, are just as important as those of The Sermon on the Mount; but
no one has yet seen them written up in letters of gold in a schoolroom or
nursery. The child is taught to be kind, to be respectful, to be quiet,
not to answer back, to be truthful when its elders want to find out
anything from it, to lie when the truth would shock or hurt its elders, to
be above all things obedient, and to be seen and not heard. Here we
have two sets of precepts, each warranted to spoil a child hopelessly
if the other be omitted. Unfortunately we do not allow fair play
between them. The rebellious, intractable, aggressive, selfish set
provoke a corrective resistance, and do not pretend to high moral or
religious sanctions; and they are never urged by grown-up people on
young people. They are therefore more in danger of neglect or
suppression than the other set, which have all the adults, all the laws, all
the religions on their side. How is the child to be secured its due
share of both bodies of doctrine?
The Schoolboy and the Homeboy
In practice what happens is that parents notice that boys brought up at
home become mollycoddles, or prigs, or duffers, unable to take care of
themselves. They see that boys should learn to rough it a little and to
mix with children of their own age. This is natural enough. When you
have preached at and punished a boy until he is a moral cripple, you are as
much hampered by him as by a physical cripple; and as you do not intend to
have him on your hands all your life, and are generally rather impatient for
the day when he will earn his own living and leave you to attend to yourself,
you sooner or later begin to talk to him about the need for self-reliance,
learning to think, and so forth, with the result that your victim, bewildered
by your inconsistency, concludes that there is no use trying to please
you, and falls into an attitude of sulky resentment. Which is
an additional inducement to pack him off to school.
In school, he finds himself in a dual world, under two
dispensations. There is the world of the boys, where the point of honor is to
be untameable, always ready to fight, ruthless in taking the conceit
out of anyone who ventures to give himself airs of superior knowledge
or taste, and generally to take Lucifer for one's model. And there
is the world of the masters, the world of discipline,
submission, diligence, obedience, and continual and shameless assumption of
moral and intellectual authority. Thus the schoolboy hears both sides,
and is so far better off than the homebred boy who hears only one.
But the two sides are not fairly presented. They are presented as
good and evil, as vice and virtue, as villainy and heroism. The boy
feels mean and cowardly when he obeys, and selfish and rascally when
he disobeys. He looses his moral courage just as he comes to hate
books and languages. In the end, John Ruskin, tied so close to his
mother's apron-string that he did not escape even when he went to Oxford,
and John Stuart Mill, whose father ought to have been prosecuted
for laying his son's childhood waste with lessons, were superior,
as products of training, to our schoolboys. They were very
conspicuously superior in moral courage; and though they did not
distinguish themselves at cricket and football, they had quite as much
physical hardihood as any civilized man needs. But it is to be observed
that Ruskin's parents were wise people who gave John a full share in
their own life, and put up with his presence both at home and abroad
when they must sometimes have been very weary of him; and Mill, as
it happens, was deliberately educated to challenge all the most
sacred institutions of his country. The households they were brought up
in were no more average households than a Montessori school is an
average school.
The Comings of Age of Children
All this inculcated adult docility, which wrecks every civilization
as it is wrecking ours, is inhuman and unnatural. We must reconsider
our institution of the Coming of Age, which is too late for some
purposes, and too early for others. There should be a series of Coming
of Ages for every individual. The mammals have their first coming of
age when they are weaned; and it is noteworthy that this rather cruel
and selfish operation on the part of the parent has to be
performed resolutely, with claws and teeth; for your little mammal does not
want to be weaned, and yields only to a pretty rough assertion of the
right of the parent to be relieved of the child as soon as the child is
old enough to bear the separation. The same thing occurs with
children: they hang on to the mother's apron-string and the father's coat
tails as long as they can, often baffling those sensitive parents who
know that children should think for themselves and fend for themselves,
but are too kind to throw them on their own resources with the ferocity
of the domestic cat. The child should have its first coming of age
when it is weaned, another when it can talk, another when it can
walk, another when it can dress itself without assistance; and when it
can read, write, count money, and pass an examination in going a
simple errand involving a purchase and a journey by rail or other
public method of locomotion, it should have quite a majority. At
present the children of laborers are soon mobile and able to shift for
themselves, whereas it is possible to find grown-up women in the rich classes
who are actually afraid to take a walk in the streets unattended
and unprotected. It is true that this is a superstition from the
time when a retinue was part of the state of persons of quality, and
the unattended person was supposed to be a common person of no
quality, earning a living; but this has now become so absurd that children
and young women are no longer told why they are forbidden to go
about alone, and have to be persuaded that the streets are dangerous
places, which of course they are; but people who are not educated to
live dangerously have only half a life, and are more likely to
die miserably after all than those who have taken all the common risks
of freedom from their childhood onward as matters of course.
The Conflict of Wills
The world wags in spite of its schools and its families because
both schools and families are mostly very largely anarchic: parents
and schoolmasters are good-natured or weak or lazy; and children
are docile and affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits
of naughtiness; and so most families slummock along and muddle
through until the children cease to be children. In the few cases when
the parties are energetic and determined, the child is crushed or
the parent is reduced to a cipher, as the case may be. When the
opposed forces are neither of them strong enough to annihilate the
other, there is serious trouble: that is how we get those feuds
between parent and child which recur to our memory so ironically when we
hear people sentimentalizing about natural affection. We even
get tragedies; for there is nothing so tragic to contemplate or
so devastating to suffer as the oppression of will without conscience; and
the whole tendency of our family and school system is to set the will of the
parent and the school despot above conscience as something that must be
deferred to abjectly and absolutely for its own sake.
The strongest, fiercest force in nature is human will. It is
the highest organization we know of the will that has created the
whole universe. Now all honest civilization, religion, law, and
convention is an attempt to keep this force within beneficent bounds.
What corrupts civilization, religion, law, and convention (and they are
at present pretty nearly as corrupt as they dare) is the constant attempts
made by the wills of individuals and classes to thwart the wills and enslave
the powers of other individuals and classes. The powers of the parent
and the schoolmaster, and of their public analogues the lawgiver and the
judge, become instruments of tyranny in the hands of those who are too
narrow-minded to understand law and exercise judgment; and in their hands
(with us they mostly fall into such hands) law becomes tyranny. And
what is a tyrant? Quite simply a person who says to another person,
young or old, "You shall do as I tell you; you shall make what I want; you
shall profess my creed; you shall have no will of your own; and your powers
shall be at the disposal of my will." It has come to this at
last: that the phrase "she has a will of her own," or "he has a will of
his own" has come to denote a person of exceptional obstinacy and
self-assertion. And even persons of good natural disposition, if
brought up to expect such deference, are roused to unreasoning fury, and
sometimes to the commission of atrocious crimes, by the slightest challenge
to their authority. Thus a laborer may be dirty, drunken,
untruthful, slothful, untrustworthy in every way without exhausting the
indulgence of the country house. But let him dare to be "disrespectful"
and he is a lost man, though he be the cleanest, soberest, most
diligent, most veracious, most trustworthy man in the county.
Dickens's instinct for detecting social cankers never served him better
than when he shewed us Mrs Heep teaching her son to "be umble,"
knowing that if he carried out that precept he might be pretty well
anything else he liked. The maintenance of deference to our wills
becomes a mania which will carry the best of us to any extremity. We
will allow a village of Egyptian fellaheen or Indian tribesmen to live the
lowest life they please among themselves without molestation; but let one
of them slay an Englishman or even strike him on the
strongest provocation, and straightway we go stark mad, burning and
destroying, shooting and shelling, flogging and hanging, if only such
survivors as we may leave are thoroughly cowed in the presence of a man with
a white face. In the committee room of a local council or
city corporation, the humblest employees of the committee find defenders
if they complain of harsh treatment. Gratuities are voted,
indulgences and holidays are pleaded for, delinquencies are excused in the
most sentimental manner provided only the employee, however patent
a hypocrite or incorrigible a slacker, is hat in hand. But let the
most obvious measure of justice be demanded by the secretary of a
Trade Union in terms which omit all expressions of subservience, and it
is with the greatest difficulty that the cooler-headed can defeat
angry motions that the letter be thrown into the waste paper basket and
the committee proceed to the next business.
The Demagogue's Opportunity
And the employee has in him the same fierce impulse to impose his
will without respect for the will of others. Democracy is in
practice nothing but a device for cajoling from him the vote he refuses
to arbitrary authority. He will not vote for Coriolanus; but when
an experienced demagogue comes along and says, "Sir: _you_ are
the dictator: the voice of the people is the voice of God; and I am
only your very humble servant," he says at once, "All right: tell me
what to dictate," and is presently enslaved more effectually with his
own silly consent than Coriolanus would ever have enslaved him
without asking his leave. And the trick by which the demagogue
defeats Coriolanus is played on him in his turn by _his_
inferiors. Everywhere we see the cunning succeeding in the world by seeking
a rich or powerful master and practising on his lust for subservience. The
political adventurer who gets into parliament by offering himself to the poor
voter, not as his representative but as his will-less soulless "delegate," is
himself the dupe of a clever wife who repudiates Votes for Women, knowing
well that whilst the man is master, the man's mistress will rule. Uriah
Heep may be a crawling creature; but his crawling takes him upstairs.
Thus does the selfishness of the will turn on itself, and obtain
by flattery what it cannot seize by open force. Democracy becomes
the latest trick of tyranny: "womanliness" becomes the latest wile
of prostitution.
Between parent and child the same conflict wages and the
same destruction of character ensues. Parents set themselves to bend
the will of their children to their own--to break their stubborn
spirit, as they call it--with the ruthlessness of Grand Inquisitors.
Cunning, unscrupulous children learn all the arts of the sneak in
circumventing tyranny: children of better character are cruelly
distressed and more or less lamed for life by it.
Our Quarrelsomeness
As between adults, we find a general quarrelsomeness which
makes political reform as impossible to most Englishmen as to hogs.
Certain sections of the nation get cured of this disability. University
men, sailors, and politicians are comparatively free from it, because
the communal life of the University, the fact that in a ship a man
must either learn to consider others or else go overboard or into
irons, and the habit of working on committees and ceasing to expect more
of one's own way than is included in the greatest common measure of
the committee, educate the will socially. But no one who has ever had
to guide a committee of ordinary private Englishmen through their
first attempts at collective action, in committee or otherwise, can
retain any illusions as to the appalling effects on our national manners
and character of the organization of the home and the school as
petty tyrannies, and the absence of all teaching of self-respect
and training in self-assertion. Bullied and ordered about, the
Englishman obeys like a sheep, evades like a knave, or tries to murder
his oppressor. Merely criticized or opposed in committee, or invited
to consider anybody's views but his own, he feels personally insulted
and wants to resign or leave the room unless he is apologized to. And
his panic and bewilderment when he sees that the older hands at the
work have no patience with him and do not intend to treat him
as infallible, are pitiable as far as they are anything but
ludicrous. That is what comes of not being taught to consider other
people's wills, and left to submit to them or to over-ride them as if they
were the winds and the weather. Such a state of mind is incompatible
not only with the democratic introduction of high civilization, but
with the comprehension and maintenance of such civilized institutions
as have been introduced by benevolent and intelligent despots
and aristocrats.
We Must Reform Society before we can Reform Ourselves
When we come to the positive problem of what to do with children if
we are to give up the established plan, we find the difficulties so
great that we begin to understand why so many people who detest the
system and look back with loathing on their own schooldays, must
helplessly send their children to the very schools they themselves were sent
to, because there is no alternative except abandoning the children
to undisciplined vagabondism. Man in society must do as everybody
else does in his class: only fools and romantic novices imagine
that freedom is a mere matter of the readiness of the individual to
snap his fingers at convention. It is true that most of us live in
a condition of quite unnecessary inhibition, wearing ugly
and uncomfortable clothes, making ourselves and other people miserable
by the heathen horrors of mourning, staying away from the theatre
because we cannot afford the stalls and are ashamed to go to the pit, and
in dozens of other ways enslaving ourselves when there are
comfortable alternatives open to us without any real drawbacks. The
contemplation of these petty slaveries, and of the triumphant ease with
which sensible people throw them off, creates an impression that if we
only take Johnson's advice to free our minds from cant, we can
achieve freedom. But if we all freed our minds from cant we should find
that for the most part we should have to go on doing the necessary work
of the world exactly as we did it before until we organized new and
free methods of doing it. Many people believed in secondary
co-education (boys and girls taught together) before schools like Bedales
were founded: indeed the practice was common enough in elementary
schools and in Scotland; but their belief did not help them until Bedales
and St George's were organized; and there are still not nearly
enough co-educational schools in existence to accommodate all the children
of the parents who believe in co-education up to university age, even
if they could always afford the fees of these exceptional schools.
It may be edifying to tell a duke that our public schools are all wrong in
their constitution and methods, or a costermonger that children should be
treated as in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister instead of as they are treated at the
elementary school at the corner of his street; but what are the duke and the
coster to do? Neither of them has any effective choice in the
matter: their children must either go to the schools that are, or to no
school at all. And as the duke thinks with reason that his son will be
a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does not go to school, and the coster
knows that his son will become an illiterate hooligan if he is left to the
streets, there is no real alternative for either of them. Child life
must be socially organized: no parent, rich or poor, can choose
institutions that do not exist; and the private enterprise of individual
school masters appealing to a group of well-to-do parents, though it may shew
what can be done by enthusiasts with new methods, cannot touch the mass
of our children. For the average parent or child nothing is
really available except the established practice; and this is what makes
it so important that the established practice should be a sound one,
and so useless for clever individuals to disparage it unless they
can organize an alternative practice and make it, too, general.
The Pursuit of Manners
If you cross-examine the duke and the coster, you will find that
they are not concerned for the scholastic attainments of their
children. Ask the duke whether he could pass the standard examination
of twelve-year-old children in elementary schools, and he will admit, with
an entirely placid smile, that he would almost certainly be ignominiously
plucked. And he is so little ashamed of or disadvantaged by his
condition that he is not prepared to spend an hour in remedying it. The
coster may resent the inquiry instead of being amused by it; but his answer,
if true, will be the same. What they both want for their children is
the communal training, the apprenticeship to society, the lessons in holding
one's own among people of all sorts with whom one is not, as in the home,
on privileged terms. These can be acquired only by "mixing with
the world," no matter how wicked the world is. No parent cares
twopence whether his children can write Latin hexameters or repeat the dates
of the accession of all the English monarchs since the Conqueror; but
all parents are earnestly anxious about the manners of their
children. Better Claude Duval than Kaspar Hauser. Laborers who
are contemptuously anti-clerical in their opinions will send
their daughters to the convent school because the nuns teach them some
sort of gentleness of speech and behavior. And peers who tell you that
our public schools are rotten through and through, and that
our Universities ought to be razed to the foundations, send their sons
to Eton and Oxford, Harrow and Cambridge, not only because there
is nothing else to be done, but because these places, though they turn out
blackguards and ignoramuses and boobies galore, turn them out with the habits
and manners of the society they belong to. Bad as those manners are in
many respects, they are better than no manners at all. And no individual or
family can possibly teach them. They can be acquired only by living in
an organized community in which they are traditional.
Thus we see that there are reasons for the segregation of children even
in families where the great reason: namely, that children are nuisances
to adults, does not press very hardly, as, for instance, in the houses of the
very poor, who can send their children to play in the streets, or the houses
of the very rich, which are so large that the children's quarters can be kept
out of the parents' way like the servants' quarters.
Not too much Wind on the Heath, Brother
What, then, is to be done? For the present, unfortunately,
little except propagating the conception of Children's Rights. Only
the achievement of economic equality through Socialism can make
it possible to deal thoroughly with the question from the point of view of
the total interest of the community, which must always consist of grown-up
children. Yet economic equality, like all simple and
obvious arrangements, seems impossible to people brought up as children
are now. Still, something can be done even within class limits.
Large communities of children of the same class are possible today;
and voluntary organization of outdoor life for children has already
begun in Boy Scouting and excursions of one kind or another. The
discovery that anything, even school life, is better for the child than
home life, will become an over-ridden hobby; and we shall presently be
told by our faddists that anything, even camp life, is better than
school life. Some blundering beginnings of this are already
perceptible. There is a movement for making our British children into
priggish little barefooted vagabonds, all talking like that born fool
George Borrow, and supposed to be splendidly healthy because they would
die if they slept in rooms with the windows shut, or perhaps even with
a roof over their heads. Still, this is a fairly healthy folly; and
it may do something to establish Mr Harold Cox's claim of a Right to
Roam as the basis of a much needed law compelling proprietors of land
to provide plenty of gates in their fences, and to leave them
unlocked when there are no growing crops to be damaged nor bulls to
be encountered, instead of, as at present, imprisoning the human race
in dusty or muddy thoroughfares between walls of barbed wire.
The reaction against vagabondage will come from the
children themselves. For them freedom will not mean the expensive kind
of savagery now called "the simple life." Their natural disgust with
the visions of cockney book fanciers blowing themselves out with "the
wind on the heath, brother," and of anarchists who are either too weak
to understand that men are strong and free in proportion to the
social pressure they can stand and the complexity of the obligations they
are prepared to undertake, or too strong to realize that what is
freedom to them may be terror and bewilderment to others, will drive them
back to the home and the school if these have meanwhile learned the
lesson that children are independent human beings and have rights.
Wanted: a Child's Magna Charta
Whether we shall presently be discussing a Juvenile Magna Charta
or Declaration of Rights by way of including children in the
Constitution is a question on which I leave others to speculate. But if
it could once be established that a child has an adult's Right of Egress
from uncomfortable places and unpleasant company, and there were
children's lawyers to sue pedagogues and others for assault and
imprisonment, there would be an amazing change in the behavior of
schoolmasters, the quality of school books, and the amenities of school
life. That Consciousness of Consent which, even in its present delusive
form, has enabled Democracy to oust tyrannical systems in spite of all
its vulgarities and stupidities and rancors and ineptitudes
and ignorances, would operate as powerfully among children as it does
now among grown-ups. No doubt the pedagogue would promptly
turn demagogue, and woo his scholars by all the arts of demagogy; but
none of these arts can easily be so dishonorable or mischievous as the
art of caning. And, after all, if larger liberties are attached to
the acquisition of knowledge, and the child finds that it can no more
go to the seaside without a knowledge of the multiplication and
pence tables than it can be an astronomer without mathematics, it will
learn the multiplication table, which is more than it always does
at present, in spite of all the canings and keepings in.
The Pursuit of Learning
When the Pursuit of Learning comes to mean the pursuit of learning
by the child instead of the pursuit of the child by Learning, cane
in hand, the danger will be precocity of the intellect, which is just
as undesirable as precocity of the emotions. We still have a silly
habit of talking and thinking as if intellect were a mechanical process
and not a passion; and in spite of the German tutors who confess
openly that three out of every five of the young men they coach
for examinations are lamed for life thereby; in spite of Dickens and
his picture of little Paul Dombey dying of lessons, we persist in
heaping on growing children and adolescent youths and maidens tasks
Pythagoras would have declined out of common regard for his own health and
common modesty as to his own capacity. And this overwork is not all
the effect of compulsion; for the average schoolmaster does not compel
his scholars to learn: he only scolds and punishes them if they do
not, which is quite a different thing, the net effect being that the
school prisoners need not learn unless they like. Nay, it is
sometimes remarked that the school dunce--meaning the one who does
not like--often turns out well afterwards, as if idleness were a sign
of ability and character. A much more sensible explanation is that
the so-called dunces are not exhausted before they begin the
serious business of life. It is said that boys will be boys; and one
can only add one wishes they would. Boys really want to be manly, and
are unfortunately encouraged thoughtlessly in this very dangerous
and overstraining aspiration. All the people who have really
worked (Herbert Spencer for instance) warn us against work as earnestly
as some people warn us against drink. When learning is placed on
the voluntary footing of sport, the teacher will find himself saying
every day "Run away and play: you have worked as much as is good for
you." Trying to make children leave school will be like trying to make
them go to bed; and it will be necessary to surprise them with the
idea that teaching is work, and that the teacher is tired and must go
play or rest or eat: possibilities always concealed by that
infamous humbug the current schoolmaster, who achieves a spurious divinity
and a witch doctor's authority by persuading children that he is
not human, just as ladies persuade them that they have no legs.
Children and Game: a Proposal
Of the many wild absurdities of our existing social order perhaps
the most grotesque is the costly and strictly enforced reservation
of large tracts of country as deer forests and breeding grounds
for pheasants whilst there is so little provision of the kind made
for children. I have more than once thought of trying to introduce
the shooting of children as a sport, as the children would then
be preserved very carefully for ten months in the year, thereby
reducing their death rate far more than the fusillades of the sportsmen
during the other two would raise it. At present the killing of a fox
except by a pack of foxhounds is regarded with horror; but you may and
do kill children in a hundred and fifty ways provided you do not
shoot them or set a pack of dogs on them. It must be admitted that
the foxes have the best of it; and indeed a glance at our pheasants,
our deer, and our children will convince the most sceptical that
the children have decidedly the worst of it.
This much hope, however, can be extracted from the present state
of things. It is so fantastic, so mad, so apparently impossible, that
no scheme of reform need ever henceforth be discredited on the ground that
it is fantastic or mad or apparently impossible. It is the sensible
schemes, unfortunately, that are hopeless in England. Therefore I have great
hopes that my own views, though fundamentally sensible, can be made to appear
fantastic enough to have a chance.
First, then, I lay it down as a prime condition of sane society, obvious
as such to anyone but an idiot, that in any decent community, children should
find in every part of their native country, food, clothing, lodging,
instruction, and parental kindness for the asking. For the matter of that, so
should adults; but the two cases differ in that as these commodities do not
grow on the bushes, the adults cannot have them unless they themselves
organize and provide the supply, whereas the children must have them as if by
magic, with nothing to do but rub the lamp, like Aladdin, and have their
needs satisfied.
The Parents' Intolerable Burden
There is nothing new in this: it is how children have always had
and must always have their needs satisfied. The parent has to play
the part of Aladdin's djinn; and many a parent has sunk beneath the
burden of this service. All the novelty we need is to organize it so
that instead of the individual child fastening like a parasite on its
own particular parents, the whole body of children should be thrown
not only upon the whole body of parents, but upon the celibates
and childless as well, whose present exemption from a full share in
the social burden of children is obviously unjust and unwholesome.
Today it is easy to find a widow who has at great cost to herself in
pain, danger, and disablement, borne six or eight children. In the
same town you will find rich bachelors and old maids, and married
couples with no children or with families voluntarily limited to two or
three. The eight children do not belong to the woman in any real or
legal sense. When she has reared them they pass away from her into
the community as independent persons, marrying strangers, working
for strangers, spending on the community the life that has been built
up at her expense. No more monstrous injustice could be imagined
than that the burden of rearing the children should fall on her alone
and not on the celibates and the selfish as well.
This is so far recognized that already the child finds, wherever
it goes, a school for it, and somebody to force it into the school;
and more and more these schools are being driven by the mere logic
of facts to provide the children with meals, with boots, with
spectacles, with dentists and doctors. In fact, when the child's
parents are destitute or not to be found, bread, lodging, and clothing
are provided. It is true that they are provided grudgingly and
on conditions infamous enough to draw down abundant fire from Heaven
upon us every day in the shape of crime and disease and vice; but still
the practice of keeping children barely alive at the charge of
the community is established; and there is no need for me to argue
about it. I propose only two extensions of the practice. One is
to provide for all the child's reasonable human wants, on which point, if
you differ from me, I shall take leave to say that you are socially a
fool and personally an inhuman wretch. The other is that these
wants should be supplied in complete freedom from compulsory schooling
or compulsory anything except restraint from crime, though, as they can be
supplied only by social organization, the child must be conscious of and
subject to the conditions of that organization, which may involve such
portions of adult responsibility and duty as a child may be able to bear
according to its age, and which will in any case prevent it from forming the
vagabond and anarchist habit of mind.
One more exception might be necessary: compulsory freedom. I am
sure that a child should not be imprisoned in a school. I am not so
sure that it should not sometimes be driven out into the
open--imprisoned in the woods and on the mountains, as it were. For
there are frowsty children, just as there are frowsty adults, who don't want
freedom. This morbid result of over-domestication would, let us hope,
soon disappear with its cause.
Mobilization
Those who see no prospect held out to them by this except a country
in which all the children shall be roaming savages, should
consider, first, whether their condition would be any worse than that of
the little caged savages of today, and second, whether either children
or adults are so apt to run wild that it is necessary to tether them
fast to one neighborhood to prevent a general dissolution of society.
My own observation leads me to believe that we are not half
mobilized enough. True, I cannot deny that we are more mobile than we
were. You will still find in the home counties old men who have never
been to London, and who tell you that they once went to Winchester or
St Albans much as if they had been to the South Pole; but they are not
so common as the clerk who has been to Paris or to Lovely Lucerne, and who
"goes away somewhere" when he has a holiday. His grandfather never had
a holiday, and, if he had, would no more have dreamed of crossing the Channel
than of taking a box at the Opera. But with all allowance for the
Polytechnic excursion and the tourist agency, our inertia is still
appalling. I confess to having once spent nine years in London without
putting my nose outside it; and though this was better, perhaps, than the
restless globe-trotting vagabondage of the idle rich, wandering from hotel to
hotel and never really living anywhere, yet I should no more have done it if
I had been properly mobilized in my childhood than I should have worn the
same suit of clothes all that time (which, by the way, I very nearly did,
my professional income not having as yet begun to sprout). There
are masses of people who could afford at least a trip to Margate, and
a good many who could afford a trip round the world, who are
more immovable than Aldgate pump. To others, who would move if they
knew how, travelling is surrounded with imaginary difficulties and
terrors. In short, the difficulty is not to fix people, but to root them
up. We keep repeating the silly proverb that a rolling stone gathers
no moss, as if moss were a desirable parasite. What we mean is that
a vagabond does not prosper. Even this is not true, if prosperity
means enjoyment as well as responsibility and money. The real misery
of vagabondage is the misery of having nothing to do and nowhere to
go, the misery of being derelict of God and Man, the misery of the
idle, poor or rich. And this is one of the miseries of
unoccupied childhood. The unoccupied adult, thus afflicted, tries
many distractions which are, to say the least, unsuited to children.
But one of them, the distraction of seeing the world, is innocent
and beneficial. Also it is childish, being a continuation of what
nurses call "taking notice," by which a child becomes experienced. It
is pitiable nowadays to see men and women doing after the age of 45
all the travelling and sightseeing they should have done before they
were 15. Mere wondering and staring at things is an important part of
a child's education: that is why children can be thoroughly
mobilized without making vagabonds of them. A vagabond is at home
nowhere because he wanders: a child should wander because it ought to
be at home everywhere. And if it has its papers and its passports, and
gets what it requires not by begging and pilfering, but from
responsible agents of the community as of right, and with some
formal acknowledgment of the obligations it is incurring and a knowledge
of the fact that these obligations are being recorded: if,
further, certain qualifications are exacted before it is promoted
from permission to go as far as its legs will carry it to using
mechanical aids to locomotion, it can roam without much danger of
gypsification.
Under such circumstances the boy or girl could always run away,
and never be lost; and on no other conditions can a child be free
without being also a homeless outcast.
Parents could also run away from disagreeable children or drive them out
of doors or even drop their acquaintance, temporarily or permanently, without
inhumanity. Thus both parties would be on their good behavior, and not,
as at present, on their filial or parental behavior, which, like all unfree
behavior, is mostly bad behavior.
As to what other results might follow, we had better wait and see;
for nobody now alive can imagine what customs and institutions would
grow up in societies of free children. Child laws and child
fashions, child manners and child morals are now not tolerated; but among
free children there would certainly be surprising developments in
this direction. I do not think there would be any danger of free
children behaving as badly as grown-up people do now because they have
never been free. They could hardly behave worse, anyhow.
Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs
A very distinguished man once assured a mother of my acquaintance
that she would never know what it meant to be hurt until she was
hurt through her children. Children are extremely cruel without
intending it; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that
they do not conceive their elders as having any human feelings. Serve
the elders right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of
the impostor is not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but that
he is taken for what he pretends to be, and treated as such. And to
be treated as anything but what you really are may seem pleasant to
the imagination when the treatment is above your merits; but in
actual experience it is often quite the reverse. When I was a very
small boy, my romantic imagination, stimulated by early doses of
fiction, led me to brag to a still smaller boy so outrageously that he, being
a simple soul, really believed me to be an invincible hero. I
cannot remember whether this pleased me much; but I do remember
very distinctly that one day this admirer of mine, who had a pet
goat, found the animal in the hands of a larger boy than either of us,
who mocked him and refused to restore the animal to his rightful
owner. Whereupon, naturally, he came weeping to me, and demanded that
I should rescue the goat and annihilate the aggressor. My terror
was beyond description: fortunately for me, it imparted such
a ghastliness to my voice and aspect as I under the eye of my poor little
dupe, advanced on the enemy with that hideous extremity of cowardice which is
called the courage of despair, and said "You let go that goat," that he
abandoned his prey and fled, to my unforgettable, unspeakable relief. I
have never since exaggerated my prowess in bodily combat.
Now what happened to me in the adventure of the goat happens very often
to parents, and would happen to schoolmasters if the prison door of the
school did not shut out the trials of life. I remember once, at school,
the resident head master was brought down to earth by the sudden illness of
his wife. In the confusion that ensued it became necessary to leave one
of the schoolrooms without a master. I was in the class that occupied
that schoolroom. To have sent us home would have been to break the
fundamental bargain with our parents by which the school was bound to keep us
out of their way for half the day at all hazards. Therefore an appeal
had to be made to our better feelings: that is, to our common humanity,
not to make a noise. But the head master had never admitted any common
humanity with us. We had been carefully broken in to regard him as a
being quite aloof from and above us: one not subject to error or
suffering or death or illness or mortality. Consequently sympathy was
impossible; and if the unfortunate lady did not perish, it was because, as I
now comfort myself with guessing, she was too much pre-occupied with her
own pains, and possibly making too much noise herself, to be conscious
of the pandemonium downstairs.
A great deal of the fiendishness of schoolboys and the cruelty
of children to their elders is produced just in this way. Elders
cannot be superhuman beings and suffering fellow-creatures at the same
time. If you pose as a little god, you must pose for better for worse.
How Little We Know About Our Parents
The relation between parent and child has cruel moments for the
parent even when money is no object, and the material worries are
delegated to servants and school teachers. The child and the parent
are strangers to one another necessarily, because their ages must
differ widely. Read Goethe's autobiography; and note that though he
was happy in his parents and had exceptional powers of
observation, divination, and story-telling, he knew less about his father
and mother than about most of the other people he mentions. I myself
was never on bad terms with my mother: we lived together until I
was forty-two years old, absolutely without the smallest friction of
any kind; yet when her death set me thinking curiously about
our relations, I realized that I knew very little about her. Introduce
me to a strange woman who was a child when I was a child, a girl when
I was a boy, an adolescent when I was an adolescent; and if we
take naturally to one another I will know more of her and she of me at
the end of forty days (I had almost said of forty minutes) than I knew
of my mother at the end of forty years. A contemporary stranger is
a novelty and an enigma, also a possibility; but a mother is like
a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which
as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is
there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or
warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does
not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as
still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning. If I meet a widow I
may ask her all about her marriage; but what son ever dreams of asking
his mother about her marriage, or could endure to hear of it
without violently breaking off the old sacred relationship between them,
and ceasing to be her child or anything more to her than the first man
in the street might be?
Yet though in this sense the child cannot realize its parent's humanity,
the parent can realize the child's; for the parents with their experience of
life have none of the illusions about the child that the child has about the
parents; and the consequence is that the child can hurt its parents' feelings
much more than its parents can hurt the child's, because the child, even when
there has been none of the deliberate hypocrisy by which children are taken
advantage of by their elders, cannot conceive the parent as a
fellow-creature, whilst the parents know very well that the children are only
themselves over again. The child cannot conceive that its blame or
contempt or want of interest could possibly hurt its parent, and therefore
expresses them all with an indifference which has given rise to the term
_enfant terrible_ (a tragic term in spite of the jests connected with
it); whilst the parent can suffer from such slights and reproaches
more from a child than from anyone else, even when the child is
not beloved, because the child is so unmistakably sincere in them.
Our Abandoned Mothers
Take a very common instance of this agonizing incompatibility.
A widow brings up her son to manhood. He meets a strange woman,
and goes off with and marries her, leaving his mother desolate. It
does not occur to him that this is at all hard on her: he does it as
a matter of course, and actually expects his mother to receive, on
terms of special affection, the woman for whom she has been abandoned.
If he shewed any sense of what he was doing, any remorse; if he
mingled his tears with hers and asked her not to think too hardly of
him because he had obeyed the inevitable destiny of a man to leave
his father and mother and cleave to his wife, she could give him
her blessing and accept her bereavement with dignity and without
reproach. But the man never dreams of such considerations. To him his
mother's feeling in the matter, when she betrays it, is
unreasonable, ridiculous, and even odious, as shewing a prejudice against
his adorable bride.
I have taken the widow as an extreme and obvious case; but there
are many husbands and wives who are tired of their consorts,
or disappointed in them, or estranged from them by infidelities; and these
parents, in losing a son or a daughter through marriage, may be losing
everything they care for. No parent's love is as innocent as the love
of a child: the exclusion of all conscious sexual feeling from it does
not exclude the bitterness, jealousy, and despair at loss which characterize
sexual passion: in fact, what is called a pure love may easily be more
selfish and jealous than a carnal one. Anyhow, it is plain matter of fact
that naively selfish people sometimes try with fierce jealousy to prevent
their children marrying.
Family Affection
Until the family as we know it ceases to exist, nobody will dare
to analyze parental affection as distinguished from that general
human sympathy which has secured to many an orphan fonder care in
a stranger's house than it would have received from its actual
parents. Not even Tolstoy, in The Kreutzer Sonata, has said all that we
suspect about it. When it persists beyond the period at which it ceases
to be necessary to the child's welfare, it is apt to be morbid; and we
are probably wrong to inculcate its deliberate cultivation. The
natural course is for the parents and children to cast off the
specific parental and filial relation when they are no longer necessary to
one another. The child does this readily enough to form fresh
ties, closer and more fascinating. Parents are not always excluded
from such compensations: it happens sometimes that when the children
go out at the door the lover comes in at the window. Indeed it
happens now oftener than it used to, because people remain much longer in
the sexual arena. The cultivated Jewess no longer cuts off her hair
at her marriage. The British matron has discarded her cap and
her conscientious ugliness; and a bishop's wife at fifty has more of
the air of a _femme galante_ than an actress had at thirty-five in
her grandmother's time. But as people marry later, the facts of age
and time still inexorably condemn most parents to comparative
solitude when their children marry. This may be a privation and may be
a relief: probably in healthy circumstances it is no worse than
a salutary change of habit; but even at that it is, for the moment
at least, a wrench. For though parents and children sometimes
dislike one another, there is an experience of succor and a habit
of dependence and expectation formed in infancy which naturally attaches a
child to its parent or to its nurse (a foster parent) in a quite peculiar
way. A benefit to the child may be a burden to the parent; but people
become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached
to them; and to "suffer little children" has become an affectionate impulse
deep in our nature.
Now there is no such impulse to suffer our sisters and brothers,
our aunts and uncles, much less our cousins. If we could choose
our relatives, we might, by selecting congenial ones, mitigate
the repulsive effect of the obligation to like them and to admit them
to our intimacy. But to have a person imposed on us as a brother
merely because he happens to have the same parents is unbearable when, as
may easily happen, he is the sort of person we should carefully avoid
if he were anyone else's brother. All Europe (except Scotland, which
has clans instead of families) draws the line at second
cousins. Protestantism draws it still closer by making the first cousin
a marriageable stranger; and the only reason for not drawing it at sisters
and brothers is that the institution of the family compels us to spend our
childhood with them, and thus imposes on us a curious relation in which
familiarity destroys romantic charm, and is yet expected to create a
specially warm affection. Such a relation is dangerously factitious and
unnatural; and the practical moral is that the less said at home about
specific family affection the better. Children, like grown-up people, get on
well enough together if they are not pushed down one another's throats; and
grown-up relatives will get on together in proportion to their separation and
their care not to presume on their blood relationship. We should let
children's feelings take their natural course without prompting. I have
seen a child scolded and called unfeeling because it did not occur to it
to make a theatrical demonstration of affectionate delight when its mother
returned after an absence: a typical example of the way in which
spurious family sentiment is stoked up. We are, after all, sociable
animals; and if we are let alone in the matter of our affections, and well
brought up otherwise, we shall not get on any the worse with particular
people because they happen to be our brothers and sisters and cousins.
The danger lies in assuming that we shall get on any better.
The main point to grasp here is that families are not kept together
at present by family feeling but by human feeling. The family
cultivates sympathy and mutual help and consolation as any other form of
kindly association cultivates them; but the addition of a dictated
compulsory affection as an attribute of near kinship is not only unnecessary,
but positively detrimental; and the alleged tendency of modern
social development to break up the family need alarm nobody. We cannot
break up the facts of kinship nor eradicate its natural
emotional consequences. What we can do and ought to do is to set people
free to behave naturally and to change their behavior as circumstances
change. To impose on a citizen of London the family duties of a
Highland cateran in the eighteenth century is as absurd as to compel him
to carry a claymore and target instead of an umbrella. The civilized
man has no special use for cousins; and he may presently find that he
has no special use for brothers and sisters. The parent seems likely
to remain indispensable; but there is no reason why that natural
tie should be made the excuse for unnatural aggravations of it,
as crushing to the parent as they are oppressive to the child.
The mother and father will not always have to shoulder the burthen
of maintenance which should fall on the Atlas shoulders of the
fatherland and motherland. Pending such reforms and emancipations, a
shattering break-up of the parental home must remain one of the normal
incidents of marriage. The parent is left lonely and the child is
not. Woe to the old if they have no impersonal interests, no
convictions, no public causes to advance, no tastes or hobbies! It is
well to be a mother but not to be a mother-in-law; and if men were cut
off artificially from intellectual and public interests as women are,
the father-in-law would be as deplorable a figure in popular tradition
as the mother-in-law.
It is not to be wondered at that some people hold that
blood relationship should be kept a secret from the persons related,
and that the happiest condition in this respect is that of the
foundling who, if he ever meets his parents or brothers or sisters, passes
them by without knowing them. And for such a view there is this to
be said: that our family system does unquestionably take the
natural bond between members of the same family, which, like all
natural bonds, is not too tight to be borne, and superimposes on it a
painful burden of forced, inculcated, suggested, and altogether
unnecessary affection and responsibility which we should do well to get rid
of by making relatives as independent of one another as possible.
The Fate of the Family
The difficulty of inducing people to talk sensibly about the family
is the same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume as
confusing discussions of marriage. Marriage is not a single
invariable institution: it changes from civilization to civilization,
from religion to religion, from civil code to civil code, from frontier
to frontier. The family is still more variable, because the number
of persons constituting a family, unlike the number of
persons constituting a marriage, varies from one to twenty: indeed,
when a widower with a family marries a widow with a family, and the
two produce a third family, even that very high number may be
surpassed. And the conditions may vary between opposite extremes: for
example, in a London or Paris slum every child adds to the burden of
poverty and helps to starve the parents and all the other children, whereas
in a settlement of pioneer colonists every child, from the moment it
is big enough to lend a hand to the family industry, is an investment
in which the only danger is that of temporary over-capitalization.
Then there are the variations in family sentiment. Sometimes the
family organization is as frankly political as the organization of an army
or an industry: fathers being no more expected to be sentimental
about their children than colonels about soldiers, or factory owners
about their employees, though the mother may be allowed a little
tenderness if her character is weak. The Roman father was a
despot: the Chinese father is an object of worship: the
sentimental modern western father is often a play-fellow looked to for toys
and pocket-money. The farmer sees his children constantly: the
squire sees them only during the holidays, and not then oftener than he can
help: the tram conductor, when employed by a joint stock company,
sometimes never sees them at all.
Under such circumstances phrases like The Influence of Home Life,
The Family, The Domestic Hearth, and so on, are no more specific than
The Mammals, or The Man In The Street; and the pious
generalizations founded so glibly on them by our sentimental moralists are
unworkable. When households average twelve persons with the sexes about
equally represented, the results may be fairly good. When they average
three the results may be very bad indeed; and to lump the two together
under the general term The Family is to confuse the question
hopelessly. The modern small family is much too stuffy: children
"brought up at home" in it are unfit for society. But here again
circumstances differ. If the parents live in what is called a garden
suburb, where there is a good deal of social intercourse, and the family,
instead of keeping itself to itself, as the evil old saying is, and glowering
at the neighbors over the blinds of the long street in which nobody
knows his neighbor and everyone wishes to deceive him as to his income
and social importance, is in effect broken up by school life,
by out-of-door habits, and by frank neighborly intercourse through
dances and concerts and theatricals and excursions and the like, families
of four may turn out much less barbarous citizens than families of
ten which attain the Boer ideal of being out of sight of one
another's chimney smoke.
All one can say is, roughly, that the homelier the home, and the
more familiar the family, the worse for everybody concerned. The
family ideal is a humbug and a nuisance: one might as reasonably talk
of the barrack ideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any other substitution
of the machinery of social organization for the end of it, which
must always be the fullest and most capable life: in short, the most
godly life. And this significant word reminds us that though the
popular conception of heaven includes a Holy Family, it does not attach
to that family the notion of a separate home, or a private nursery
or kitchen or mother-in-law, or anything that constitutes the family as we
know it. Even blood relationship is miraculously abstracted from it;
and the Father is the father of all children, the mother the mother of all
mothers and babies, and the Son the Son of Man and the Savior of his
brothers: one whose chief utterance on the subject of the conventional
family was an invitation to all of us to leave our families and follow him,
and to leave the dead to bury the dead, and not debauch ourselves at that
gloomy festival the family funeral, with its sequel of hideous mourning and
grief which is either affected or morbid.
Family Mourning
I do not know how far this detestable custom of mourning is carried
in France; but judging from the appearance of the French people I
should say that a Frenchwoman goes into mourning for her cousins to
the seventeenth degree. The result is that when I cross the Channel
I seem to have reached a country devastated by war or pestilence. It
is really suffering only from the family. Will anyone pretend
that England has not the best of this striking difference? Yet it is
such senseless and unnatural conventions as this that make us so
impatient of what we call family feeling. Even apart from its
insufferable pretensions, the family needs hearty discrediting; for there is
hardly any vulnerable part of it that could not be amputated with
advantage.
Art Teaching
By art teaching I hasten to say that I do not mean giving
children lessons in freehand drawing and perspective. I am simply
calling attention to the fact that fine art is the only teacher
except torture. I have already pointed out that nobody, except under
threat of torture, can read a school book. The reason is that a school
book is not a work of art. Similarly, you cannot listen to a lesson or
a sermon unless the teacher or the preacher is an artist. You
cannot read the Bible if you have no sense of literary art. The reason
why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American,
so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized
English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental
versions are comparatively artless. To read a dull book; to listen to
a tedious play or prosy sermon or lecture; to stare at
uninteresting pictures or ugly buildings: nothing, short of disease, is
more dreadful than this. The violence done to our souls by it
leaves injuries and produces subtle maladies which have never been
properly studied by psycho-pathologists. Yet we are so inured to it in
school, where practically all the teachers are bores trying to do the work
of artists, and all the books artless, that we acquire a truly
frightful power of enduring boredom. We even acquire the notion that
fine art is lascivious and destructive to the character. In church, in
the House of Commons, at public meetings, we sit solemnly listening
to bores and twaddlers because from the time we could walk or speak
we have been snubbed, scolded, bullied, beaten and imprisoned whenever
we dared to resent being bored or twaddled at, or to express our
natural impatience and derision of bores and twaddlers. And when a man
arises with a soul of sufficient native strength to break the bonds of
this inculcated reverence and to expose and deride and tweak the noses
of our humbugs and panjandrums, like Voltaire or Dickens, we are
shocked and scandalized, even when we cannot help laughing. Worse, we
dread and persecute those who can see and declare the truth, because
their sincerity and insight reflects on our delusion and blindness. We
are all like Nell Gwynne's footman, who defended Nell's reputation
with his fists, not because he believed her to be what he called an
honest woman, but because he objected to be scorned as the footman of one
who was no better than she should be.
This wretched power of allowing ourselves to be bored may seem to
give the fine arts a chance sometimes. People will sit through
a performance of Beethoven's ninth symphony or of Wagner's Ring just
as they will sit through a dull sermon or a front bench politician
saying nothing for two hours whilst his unfortunate country is
perishing through the delay of its business in Parliament. But their
endurance is very bad for the ninth symphony, because they never hiss when it
is murdered. I have heard an Italian conductor (no longer living)
take the _adagio_ of that symphony at a lively _allegretto_, slowing
down for the warmer major sections into the speed and manner of
the heroine's death song in a Verdi opera; and the listeners, far
from relieving my excruciation by rising with yells of fury and
hurling their programs and opera glasses at the miscreant, behaved just
as they do when Richter conducts it. The mass of imposture that
thrives on this combination of ignorance with despairing endurance
is incalculable. Given a public trained from childhood to stand
anything tedious, and so saturated with school discipline that even with
the doors open and no schoolmasters to stop them they will sit
there helplessly until the end of the concert or opera gives them leave
to go home; and you will have in great capitals hundreds of thousands
of pounds spent every night in the season on professedly
artistic entertainments which have no other effect on fine art than
to exacerbate the hatred in which it is already secretly held in
England.
Fortunately, there are arts that cannot be cut off from the people
by bad performances. We can read books for ourselves; and we can play
a good deal of fine music for ourselves with the help of a
pianola. Nothing stands between us and the actual handwork of the great
masters of painting except distance; and modern photographic methods
of reproduction are in some cases quite and in many nearly as effective in
conveying the artist's message as a modern edition of Shakespear's plays is
in conveying the message that first existed in his handwriting. The
reproduction of great feats of musical execution is already on the way:
the phonograph, for all its wheezing and snarling and braying, is steadily
improving in its manners; and what with this improvement on the one hand, and
on the other that blessed selective faculty which enables us to ignore a good
deal of disagreeable noise if there is a thread of music in the middle of it
(few critics of the phonograph seem to be conscious of the very considerable
mechanical noise set up by choirs and orchestras) we have at last reached a
point at which, for example, a person living in an English village where
the church music is the only music, and that music is made by a
few well-intentioned ladies with the help of a harmonium, can hear
masses by Palestrina very passably executed, and can thereby be led to
the discovery that Jackson in F and Hymns Ancient and Modern are
not perhaps the last word of beauty and propriety in the praise of God.
In short, there is a vast body of art now within the reach
of everybody. The difficulty is that this art, which alone can
educate us in grace of body and soul, and which alone can make the history
of the past live for us or the hope of the future shine for us,
which alone can give delicacy and nobility to our crude lusts, which is
the appointed vehicle of inspiration and the method of the communion
of saints, is actually branded as sinful among us because, wherever
it arises, there is resistance to tyranny, breaking of fetters, and
the breath of freedom. The attempt to suppress art is not
wholly successful: we might as well try to suppress oxygen. But
it is carried far enough to inflict on huge numbers of people a
most injurious art starvation, and to corrupt a great deal of the art
that is tolerated. You will find in England plenty of rich families
with little more culture than their dogs and horses. And you will
find poor families, cut off by poverty and town life from the
contemplation of the beauty of the earth, with its dresses of leaves, its
scarves of cloud, and its contours of hill and valley, who would positively
be happier as hogs, so little have they cultivated their humanity by
the only effective instrument of culture: art. The dearth
is artificially maintained even when there are the means of
satisfying it. Story books are forbidden, picture post cards are
forbidden, theatres are forbidden, operas are forbidden, circuses are
forbidden, sweetmeats are forbidden, pretty colors are forbidden, all exactly
as vice is forbidden. The Creator is explicitly prayed to,
and implicitly convicted of indecency every day. An association of
vice and sin with everything that is delightful and of goodness
with everything that is wretched and detestable is set up. All the
most perilous (and glorious) appetites and propensities are at
once inflamed by starvation and uneducated by art. All the
wholesome conditions which art imposes on appetite are waived: instead
of cultivated men and women restrained by a thousand delicacies,
repelled by ugliness, chilled by vulgarity, horrified by coarseness, deeply
and sweetly moved by the graces that art has revealed to them and
nursed in them, we get indiscrimmate rapacity in pursuit of pleasure and
a parade of the grossest stimulations in catering for it. We have
a continual clamor for goodness, beauty, virtue, and sanctity, with
such an appalling inability to recognize it or love it when it arrives
that it is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to
promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their
savings. Do not for a moment suppose that uncultivated people are
merely indifferent to high and noble qualities. They hate them
malignantly. At best, such qualities are like rare and beautiful birds:
when they appear the whole country takes down its guns; but the birds
receive the statuary tribute of having their corpses stuffed.
And it really all comes from the habit of preventing children from being
troublesome. You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing how
troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo only
to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse. You
decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not suited for
young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either
Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental protection. You
have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger: you have
depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down all the defences
which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom. You have
men who imagine themselves to be ministers of religion openly declaring that
when they pass through the streets they have to keep out in the wheeled
traffic to avoid the temptations of the pavement. You have them
organizing hunts of the women who tempt them--poor creatures whom no artist
would touch without a shudder--and wildly clamoring for more clothes to
disguise and conceal the body, and for the abolition of pictures,
statues, theatres, and pretty colors. And incredible as it seems,
these unhappy lunatics are left at large, unrebuked, even admired
and revered, whilst artists have to struggle for toleration. To them
an undraped human body is the most monstrous, the most blighting, the most
obscene, the most unbearable spectacle in the universe. To an artist it
is, at its best, the most admirable spectacle in nature, and, at its average,
an object of indifference. If every rag of clothing miraculously
dropped from the inhabitants of London at noon tomorrow (say as a preliminary
to the Great Judgment), the artistic people would not turn a hair; but the
artless people would go mad and call on the mountains to hide them. I
submit that this indicates a thoroughly healthy state on the part of the
artists, and a thoroughly morbid one on the part of the artless. And
the healthy state is attainable in a cold country like ours only by
familiarity with the undraped figure acquired through pictures, statues, and
theatrical representations in which an illusion of natural clotheslessness
is produced and made poetic.
In short, we all grow up stupid and mad to just the extent to which
we have not been artistically educated; and the fact that this taint
of stupidity and madness has to be tolerated because it is general, and is
even boasted of as characteristically English, makes the situation all the
worse. It is becoming exceedingly grave at present, because the last
ray of art is being cut off from our schools by the discontinuance of
religious education.
The Impossibility of Secular Education
Now children must be taught some sort of religion. Secular
education is an impossibility. Secular education comes to this:
that the only reason for ceasing to do evil and learning to do well is that
if you do not you will be caned. This is worse than being taught in a
church school that if you become a dissenter you will go to hell; for hell
is presented as the instrument of something eternal, divine,
and inevitable: you cannot evade it the moment the schoolmaster's back
is turned. What confuses this issue and leads even highly
intelligent religious persons to advocate secular education as a means of
rescuing children from the strife of rival proselytizers is the failure
to distinguish between the child's personal subjective need for a religion
and its right to an impartially communicated historical objective knowledge
of all the creeds and Churches. Just as a child, no matter what its
race and color may be, should know that there are black men and brown men and
yellow men, and, no matter what its political convictions may be, that there
are Monarchists and Republicans and Positivists, Socialists and Unsocialists,
so it should know that there are Christians and Mahometans and Buddhists
and Shintoists and so forth, and that they are on the average just
as honest and well-behaved as its own father. For example, it should
not be told that Allah is a false god set up by the Turks and Arabs,
who will all be damned for taking that liberty; but it should be told
that many English people think so, and that many Turks and Arabs think
the converse about English people. It should be taught that Allah
is simply the name by which God is known to Turks and Arabs, who are
just as eligible for salvation as any Christian. Further, that
the practical reason why a Turkish child should pray in a mosque and
an English child in a church is that as worship is organized in Turkey
in mosques in the name of Mahomet and in England in churches in the
name of Christ, a Turkish child joining the Church of England or an
English child following Mahomet will find that it has no place for its
worship and no organization of its religion within its reach. Any
other teaching of the history and present facts of religion is
false teaching, and is politically extremely dangerous in an empire in
which a huge majority of the fellow subjects of the governing island do
not profess the religion of that island.
But this objectivity, though intellectually honest, tells the child only
what other people believe. What it should itself believe is quite
another matter. The sort of Rationalism which says to a child "You must
suspend your judgment until you are old enough to choose your religion" is
Rationalism gone mad. The child must have a conscience and a code of
honor (which is the essence of religion) even if it be only a provisional
one, to be revised at its confirmation. For confirmation is meant to
signalize a spiritual coming of age, and may be a repudiation. Really
active souls have many confirmations and repudiations as their life deepens
and their knowledge widens. But what is to guide the child before its
first confirmation? Not mere orders, because orders must have a
sanction of some sort or why should the child obey them? If, as a
Secularist, you refuse to teach any sanction, you must say "You will be
punished if you disobey." "Yes," says the child to itself, "if I am
found out; but wait until your back is turned and I will do as I like, and
lie about it." There can be no objective punishment for successful
fraud; and as no espionage can cover the whole range of a child's conduct,
the upshot is that the child becomes a liar and schemer with an atrophied
conscience. And a good many of the orders given to it are not obeyed
after all. Thus the Secularist who is not a fool is forced to appeal to
the child's vital impulse towards perfection, to the divine spark; and
no resolution not to call this impulse an impulse of loyalty to
the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, or obedience to the Will of God, or
any other standard theological term, can alter the fact that
the Secularist has stepped outside Secularism and is educating the
child religiously, even if he insists on repudiating that pious adverb
and substituting the word metaphysically.
Natural Selection as a Religion
We must make up our minds to it therefore that whatever measures we may
be forced to take to prevent the recruiting sergeants of the Churches, free
or established, from obtaining an exclusive right of entry to schools, we
shall not be able to exclude religion from them. The most horrible of all
religions: that which teaches us to regard ourselves as the helpless
prey of a series of senseless accidents called Natural Selection, is allowed
and even welcomed in so-called secular schools because it is, in a sense, the
negation of all religion; but for school purposes a religion is a belief
which affects conduct; and no belief affects conduct more radically and often
so disastrously as the belief that the universe is a product of
Natural Selection. What is more, the theory of Natural Selection cannot
be kept out of schools, because many of the natural facts that present the
most plausible appearance of design can be accounted for by Natural
Selection; and it would be so absurd to keep a child in delusive ignorance of
so potent a factor in evolution as to keep it in ignorance of radiation or
capillary attraction. Even if you make a religion of Natural Selection,
and teach the child to regard itself as the irresponsible prey of its
circumstances and appetites (or its heredity as you will perhaps call them),
you will none the less find that its appetites are stimulated by your
encouragement and daunted by your discouragement; that one of its appetites
is an appetite for perfection; that if you discourage this appetite and
encourage the cruder acquisitive appetites the child will steal and lie and
be a nuisance to you; and that if you encourage its appetite for
perfection and teach it to attach a peculiar sacredness to it and place it
before the other appetites, it will be a much nicer child and you will have
a much easier job, at which point you will, in spite of
your pseudoscientific jargon, find yourself back in the
old-fashioned religious teaching as deep as Dr. Watts and in fact fathoms
deeper.
Moral Instruction Leagues
And now the voices of our Moral Instruction Leagues will be
lifted, asking whether there is any reason why the appetite for
perfection should not be cultivated in rationally scientific terms instead
of being associated with the story of Jonah and the great fish and
the thousand other tales that grow up round religions. Yes: there
are many reasons; and one of them is that children all like the story
of Jonah and the whale (they insist on its being a whale in spite
of demonstrations by Bible smashers without any sense of humor that
Jonah would not have fitted into a whale's gullet--as if the story would
be credible of a whale with an enlarged throat) and that no child on earth
can stand moral instruction books or catechisms or any other statement of the
case for religion in abstract terms. The object of a moral instruction
book is not to be rational, scientific, exact, proof against controversy, nor
even credible: its object is to make children good; and if it makes
them sick instead its place is the waste-paper basket.
Take for an illustration the story of Elisha and the bears. To
the authors of the moral instruction books it is in the last
degree reprehensible. It is obviously not true as a record of fact; and
the picture it gives us of the temper of God (which is what interests
an adult reader) is shocking and blasphemous. But it is a capital
story for a child. It interests a child because it is about bears; and
it leaves the child with an impression that children who poke fun at
old gentlemen and make rude remarks about bald heads are not
nice children, which is a highly desirable impression, and just as much
as a child is capable of receiving from the story. When a story is
about God and a child, children take God for granted and criticize
the child. Adults do the opposite, and are thereby led to talk
great nonsense about the bad effect of Bible stories on infants.
But let no one think that a child or anyone else can learn religion from
a teacher or a book or by any academic process whatever. It is only by
an unfettered access to the whole body of Fine Art: that is, to the
whole body of inspired revelation, that we can build up that conception of
divinity to which all virtue is an aspiration. And to hope to find this
body of art purified from all that is obsolete or dangerous or fierce or
lusty, or to pick and choose what will be good for any particular child, much
less for all children, is the shallowest of vanities. Such
schoolmasterly selection is neither possible nor desirable. Ignorance
of evil is not virtue but imbecility: admiring it is like giving a
prize for honesty to a man who has not stolen your watch because he did not
know you had one. Virtue chooses good from evil; and without knowledge there
can be no choice. And even this is a dangerous simplification of what
actually occurs. We are not choosing: we are growing. Were
you to cut all of what you call the evil out of a child, it would drop
dead. If you try to stretch it to full human stature when it is ten
years old, you will simply pull it into two pieces and be hanged. And
when you try to do this morally, which is what parents and schoolmasters are
doing every day, you ought to be hanged; and some day, when we take a
sensible view of the matter, you will be; and serve you right. The
child does not stand between a good and a bad angel: what it has to
deal with is a middling angel who, in normal healthy cases, wants to be a
good angel as fast as it can without killing itself in the process,
which is a dangerous one.
Therefore there is no question of providing the child with a
carefully regulated access to good art. There is no good art, any more
than there is good anything else in the absolute sense. Art that is
too good for the child will either teach it nothing or drive it mad,
as the Bible has driven many people mad who might have kept their
sanity had they been allowed to read much lower forms of literature.
The practical moral is that we must read whatever stories, see
whatever pictures, hear whatever songs and symphonies, go to whatever plays
we like. We shall not like those which have nothing to say to us;
and though everyone has a right to bias our choice, no one has a right
to deprive us of it by keeping us from any work of art or any work of
art from us.
I may now say without danger of being misunderstood that the
popular English compromise called Cowper Templeism (unsectarian
Bible education) is not so silly as it looks. It is true that the
Bible inculcates half a dozen religions: some of them barbarous;
some cynical and pessimistic; some amoristic and romantic; some
sceptical and challenging; some kindly, simple, and intuitional;
some sophistical and intellectual; none suited to the character
and conditions of western civilization unless it be the Christianity
which was finally suppressed by the Crucifixion, and has never been put
into practice by any State before or since. But the Bible contains
the ancient literature of a very remarkable Oriental race; and
the imposition of this literature, on whatever false pretences, on
our children left them more literate than if they knew no literature
at all, which was the practical alternative. And as our
Authorized Version is a great work of art as well, to know it was better
than knowing no art, which also was the practical alternative. It is
at least not a school book; and it is not a bad story book, horrible
as some of the stories are. Therefore as between the Bible and the
blank represented by secular education, the choice is with the Bible.
The Bible
But the Bible is not sufficient. The real Bible of modern Europe
is the whole body of great literature in which the inspiration
and revelation of Hebrew Scripture has been continued to the present
day. Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zoroaster is less comforting to the ill
and unhappy than the Psalms; but it is much truer, subtler, and
more edifying. The pleasure we get from the rhetoric of the book of
Job and its tragic picture of a bewildered soul cannot disguise
the ignoble irrelevance of the retort of God with which it closes,
or supply the need of such modern revelations as Shelley's Prometheus
or The Niblung's Ring of Richard Wagner. There is nothing in the
Bible greater in inspiration than Beethoven's ninth symphony; and the
power of modern music to convey that inspiration to a modern man is
far greater than that of Elizabethan English, which is, except for
people steeped in the Bible from childhood like Sir Walter Scott and
Ruskin, a dead language.
Besides, many who have no ear for literature or for music are accessible
to architecture, to pictures, to statues, to dresses, and to the arts of the
stage. Every device of art should be brought to bear on the young; so
that they may discover some form of it that delights them naturally; for
there will come to all of them that period between dawning adolescence and
full maturity when the pleasures and emotions of art will have to satisfy
cravings which, if starved or insulted, may become morbid and seek
disgraceful satisfactions, and, if prematurely gratified otherwise
than poetically, may destroy the stamina of the race. And it must be
borne in mind that the most dangerous art for this necessary purpose is
the art that presents itself as religious ecstasy. Young people are
ripe for love long before they are ripe for religion. Only a very
foolish person would substitute the Imitation of Christ for Treasure Island
as a present for a boy or girl, or for Byron's Don Juan as a present for a
swain or lass. Pickwick is the safest saint for us in our
nonage. Flaubert's Temptation of St Anthony is an excellent book for a man
of fifty, perhaps the best within reach as a healthy study of
visionary ecstasy; but for the purposes of a boy of fifteen Ivanhoe and
the Templar make a much better saint and devil. And the boy of
fifteen will find this out for himself if he is allowed to wander in
a well-stocked literary garden, and hear bands and see pictures and spend
his pennies on cinematograph shows. His choice may often be rather
disgusting to his elders when they want him to choose the best before he is
ready for it. The greatest Protestant Manifesto ever written, as far as
I know, is Houston Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century:
everybody capable of it should read it. Probably the History of Maria
Monk is at the opposite extreme of merit (this is a guess: I have never
read it); but it is certain that a boy let loose in a library would go for
Maria Monk and have no use whatever for Mr Chamberlain. I should
probably have read Maria Monk myself if I had not had the Arabian Nights and
their like to occupy me better. In art, children, like adults, will find
their level if they are left free to find it, and not restricted to what
adults think good for them. Just at present our young people are going
mad over ragtimes, apparently because syncopated rhythms are new to
them. If they had learnt what can be done with syncopation from
Beethoven's third Leonora overture, they would enjoy the ragtimes all the
more; but they would put them in their proper place as amusing
vulgarities.
Artist Idolatry
But there are more dangerous influences than ragtimes waiting for people
brought up in ignorance of fine art. Nothing is more
pitiably ridiculous than the wild worship of artists by those who have
never been seasoned in youth to the enchantments of art. Tenors and
prima donnas, pianists and violinists, actors and actresses enjoy powers
of seduction which in the middle ages would have exposed them to the
risk of being burnt for sorcery. But as they exercise this power
by singing, playing, and acting, no great harm is done except perhaps
to themselves. Far graver are the powers enjoyed by brilliant
persons who are also connoisseurs in art. The influence they can
exercise on young people who have been brought up in the darkness and
wretchedness of a home without art, and in whom a natural bent towards art
has always been baffled and snubbed, is incredible to those who have
not witnessed and understood it. He (or she) who reveals the world of
art to them opens heaven to them. They become satellites,
disciples, worshippers of the apostle. Now the apostle may be a
voluptuary without much conscience. Nature may have given him enough
virtue to suffice in a reasonable environment. But this allowance may
not be enough to defend him against the temptation and demoralization
of finding himself a little god on the strength of what ought to be
a quite ordinary culture. He may find adorers in all directions in
our uncultivated society among people of stronger character than
himself, not one of whom, if they had been artistically educated, would
have had anything to learn from him or regarded him as in any
way extraordinary apart from his actual achievements as an
artist. Tartuffe is not always a priest. Indeed he is not always a
rascal: he is often a weak man absurdly credited with omniscience
and perfection, and taking unfair advantages only because they are
offered to him and he is too weak to refuse. Give everyone his culture,
and no one will offer him more than his due.
In thus delivering our children from the idolatry of the artist,
we shall not destroy for them the enchantment of art: on the
contrary, we shall teach them to demand art everywhere as a condition
attainable by cultivating the body, mind, and heart. Art, said Morris,
is the expression of pleasure in work. And certainly, when work is
made detestable by slavery, there is no art. It is only when learning
is made a slavery by tyrannical teachers that art becomes loathsome to the
pupil.
"The Machine"
When we set to work at a Constitution to secure freedom for children, we
had better bear in mind that the children may not be at all obliged to us for
our pains. Rousseau said that men are born free; and this saying, in
its proper bearings, was and is a great and true saying; yet let it not lead
us into the error of supposing that all men long for freedom and embrace it
when it is offered to them. On the contrary, it has to be forced on
them; and even then they will give it the slip if it is not religiously
inculcated and strongly safeguarded.
Besides, men are born docile, and must in the nature of things remain so
with regard to everything they do not understand. Now political science
and the art of govemment are among the things they do not understand, and
indeed are not at present allowed to understand. They can be enslaved
by a system, as we are at present, because it happens to be there, and nobody
understands it. An intelligently worked Capitalist system, as Comte
saw, would give us all that most of us are intelligent enough to want.
What makes it produce such unspeakably vile results is that it is an
automatic system which is as little understood by those who profit by it in
money as by those who are starved and degraded by it: our millionaires
and statesmen are manifestly no more "captains of industry" or scientific
politicians than our bookmakers are mathematicians. For some time past
a significant word has been coming into use as a substitute for
Destiny, Fate, and Providence. It is "The Machine": the machine
that has no god in it. Why do governments do nothing in spite of
reports of Royal Commissions that establish the most frightful urgency?
Why do our philanthropic millionaires do nothing, though they are ready to
throw bucketfuls of gold into the streets? The Machine will not let
them. Always the Machine. In short, they don't know how.
They try to reform Society as an old lady might try to restore a broken
down locomotive by prodding it with a knitting needle. And this is not
at all because they are born fools, but because they have been educated, not
into manhood and freedom, but into blindness and slavery by their parents and
schoolmasters, themselves the victims of a similar misdirection, and
consequently of The Machine. They do not want liberty. They have
not been educated to want it. They choose slavery and inequality; and
all the other evils are automatically added to them.
And yet we must have The Machine. It is only in unskilled hands
under ignorant direction that machinery is dangerous. We can no more
govern modern communities without political machinery than we can feed
and clothe them without industrial machinery. Shatter The Machine,
and you get Anarchy. And yet The Machine works so detestably at
present that we have people who advocate Anarchy and call
themselves Anarchists.
The Provocation to Anarchism
What is valid in Anarchism is that all Governments try to simplify their
task by destroying liberty and glorifying authority in general and their own
deeds in particular. But the difficulty in combining law and order with
free institutions is not a natural one. It is a matter of
inculcation. If people are brought up to be slaves, it is useless and
dangerous to let them loose at the age of twenty-one and say "Now you are
free." No one with the tamed soul and broken spirit of a slave can be
free. It is like saying to a laborer brought up on a family income of
thirteen shillings a week, "Here is one hundred thousand pounds: now
you are wealthy." Nothing can make such a man really wealthy.
Freedom and wealth are difficult and responsible conditions to which men must
be accustomed and socially trained from birth. A nation that is free at
twenty-one is not free at all; just as a man first enriched at fifty remains
poor all his life, even if he does not curtail it by drinking himself to
death in the first wild ecstasy of being able to swallow as much as he likes
for the first time. You cannot govern men brought up as slaves
otherwise than as slaves are governed. You may pile Bills of Right and
Habeas Corpus Acts on Great Charters; promulgate American Constitutions; burn
the chateaux and guillotine the seigneurs; chop off the heads of kings
and queens and set up Democracy on the ruins of feudalism: the end of
it all for us is that already in the twentieth century there has been
as much brute coercion and savage intolerance, as much flogging
and hanging, as much impudent injustice on the bench and lustful rancor
in the pulpit, as much naive resort to torture, persecution,
and suppression of free speech and freedom of the press, as much war,
as much of the vilest excess of mutilation, rapine, and
delirious indiscriminate slaughter of helpless non-combatants, old and young,
as much prostitution of professional talent, literary and political,
in defence of manifest wrong, as much cowardly sycophancy giving
fine names to all this villainy or pretending that it is
"greatly exaggerated," as we can find any record of from the days when
the advocacy of liberty was a capital offence and Democracy was
hardly thinkable. Democracy exhibits the vanity of Louis XIV, the
savagery of Peter of Russia, the nepotism and provinciality of Napoleon,
the fickleness of Catherine II: in short, all the childishnesses of
all the despots without any of the qualities that enabled the greatest
of them to fascinate and dominate their contemporaries.
And the flatterers of Democracy are as impudently servile to
the successful, and insolent to common honest folk, as the flatterers
of the monarchs. Democracy in America has led to the withdrawal
of ordinary refined persons from politics; and the same result is
coming in England as fast as we make Democracy as democratic as it is
in America. This is true also of popular religion: it is so
horribly irreligious that nobody with the smallest pretence to culture, or
the least inkling of what the great prophets vainly tried to make
the world understand, will have anything to do with it except for
purely secular reasons.
Imagination
Before we can clearly understand how baleful is this condition
of intimidation in which we live, it is necessary to clear up
the confusion made by our use of the word imagination to denote two
very different powers of mind. One is the power to imagine things as
they are not: this I call the romantic imagination. The other is
the power to imagine things as they are without actually sensing them;
and this I will call the realistic imagination. Take for example
marriage and war. One man has a vision of perpetual bliss with a
domestic angel at home, and of flashing sabres, thundering guns,
victorious cavalry charges, and routed enemies in the field. That is
romantic imagination; and the mischief it does is incalculable. It
begins in silly and selfish expectations of the impossible, and ends in
spiteful disappointment, sour grievance, cynicism, and misanthropic
resistance to any attempt to better a hopeless world. The wise man
knows that imagination is not only a means of pleasing himself and
beguiling tedious hours with romances and fairy tales and fools' paradises
(a quite defensible and delightful amusement when you know exactly
what you are doing and where fancy ends and facts begin), but also a
means of foreseeing and being prepared for realities as yet
unexperienced, and of testing the possibility and desirability of serious
Utopias. He does not expect his wife to be an angel; nor does he overlook
the facts that war depends on the rousing of all the
murderous blackguardism still latent in mankind; that every victory means
a defeat; that fatigue, hunger, terror, and disease are the raw
material which romancers work up into military glory; and that soldiers for
the most part go to war as children go to school, because they are
afraid not to. They are afraid even to say they are afraid, as such
candor is punishable by death in the military code.
A very little realistic imagination gives an ambitious person
enormous power over the multitudinous victims of the romantic
imagination. For the romancer not only pleases himself with fictitious
glories: he also terrifies himself with imaginary dangers. He
does not even picture what these dangers are: he conceives the unknown
as always dangerous. When you say to a realist "You must do this" or
"You must not do that," he instantly asks what will happen to him if he does
(or does not, as the case may be). Failing an unromantic
convincing answer, he does just as he pleases unless he can find for himself
a real reason for refraining. In short, though you can intimidate
him, you cannot bluff him. But you can always bluff the romantic
person: indeed his grasp of real considerations is so feeble that you find
it necessary to bluff him even when you have solid considerations to offer
him instead. The campaigns of Napoleon, with their atmosphere of glory,
illustrate this. In the Russian campaign Napoleon's marshals achieved
miracles of bluff, especially Ney, who, with a handful of men, monstrously
outnumbered, repeatedly kept the Russian troops paralyzed with terror by pure
bounce. Napoleon himself, much more a realist than Ney (that was why he
dominated him), would probably have surrendered; for sometimes the bravest of
the brave will achieve successes never attempted by the cleverest of the
clever. Wellington was a completer realist than Napoleon. It was
impossible to persuade Wellington that he was beaten until he actually
was beaten. He was unbluffable; and if Napoleon had understood the
nature of Wellington's strength instead of returning Wellington's
snobbish contempt for him by an academic contempt for Wellington, he would
not have left the attack at Waterloo to Ney and D'Erlon, who, on
that field, did not know when they were beaten, whereas Wellington
knew precisely when he was not beaten. The unbluffable would
have triumphed anyhow, probably, because Napoleon was an academic
soldier, doing the academic thing (the attack in columns and so forth)
with superlative ability and energy; whilst Wellington was an
original soldier who, instead of outdoing the terrible academic columns
with still more terrible and academic columns, outwitted them with the
thin red line, not of heroes, but, as this uncompromising realist
never hesitated to testify, of the scum of the earth.
Government by Bullies
These picturesque martial incidents are being reproduced every day
in our ordinary life. We are bluffed by hardy simpletons and
headstrong bounders as the Russians were bluffed by Ney; and our Wellingtons
are threadbound by slave-democracy as Gulliver was threadbound by
the Lilliputians. We are a mass of people living in a submissive
routine to which we have been drilled from our childhood. When you ask
us to take the simplest step outside that routine, we say shyly, "Oh,
I really couldnt," or "Oh, I shouldnt like to," without being able
to point out the smallest harm that could possibly ensue: victims,
not of a rational fear of real dangers, but of pure abstract fear,
the quintessence of cowardice, the very negation of "the fear of
God." Dotted about among us are a few spirits relatively free from
this inculcated paralysis, sometimes because they are
half-witted, sometimes because they are unscrupulously selfish, sometimes
because they are realists as to money and unimaginative as to other
things, sometimes even because they are exceptionally able, but always
because they are not afraid of shadows nor oppressed with nightmares.
And we see these few rising as if by magic into power and affluence,
and forming, with the millionaires who have accidentally gained
huge riches by the occasional windfalls of our commerce, the
governing class. Now nothing is more disastrous than a governing class
that does not know how to govern. And how can this rabble of the
casual products of luck, cunning, and folly, be expected to know how
to govern? The merely lucky ones and the hereditary ones do not
owe their position to their qualifications at all. As to the rest,
the realism which seems their essential qualification often consists
not only in a lack of romantic imagination, which lack is a merit, but
of the realistic, constructive, Utopian imagination, which lack is
a ghastly defect. Freedom from imaginative illusion is therefore
no guarantee whatever of nobility of character: that is why
inculcated submissiveness makes us slaves to people much worse than
ourselves, and why it is so important that submissiveness should no longer
be inculcated.
And yet as long as you have the compulsory school as we know it,
we shall have submissiveness inculcated. What is more, until the
active hours of child life are organized separately from the active hours
of adult life, so that adults can enjoy the society of children in
reason without being tormented, disturbed, harried, burdened, and hindered
in their work by them as they would be now if there were no
compulsory schools and no children hypnotized into the belief that they
must tamely go to them and be imprisoned and beaten and over-tasked
in them, we shall have schools under one pretext or another; and we
shall have all the evil consequences and all the social hopelessness
that result from turning a nation of potential freemen and freewomen into
a nation of two-legged spoilt spaniels with everything crushed out
of their nature except dread of the whip. Liberty is the breath of
life to nations; and liberty is the one thing that parents,
schoolmasters, and rulers spend their lives in extirpating for the sake of
an immediately quiet and finally disastrous life.
