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.