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




What We Do Not Teach, and Why

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

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

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

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

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

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




Taboo in Schools

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

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

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




Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools

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




What is to be Done?

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

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

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




Children's Rights and Duties

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




Should Children Earn their Living?

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




Children's Happiness

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




The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday

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

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

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

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




University Schoolboyishness

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




The New Laziness

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




The Infinite School Task

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

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




The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge

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

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

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




English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual Cowardice

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

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




The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness

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




The Common Sense of Toleration

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

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

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




The Sin of Athanasius

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

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




The Experiment Experimenting

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

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