A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

By Bernard Shaw



CONTENTS

     Parents and Children
     Trailing Clouds of Glory
     The Child is Father to the Man
     What is a Child?
     The Sin of Nadab and Abihu
     The Manufacture of Monsters
     Small and Large Families
     Children as Nuisances
     Child Fanciers
     Childhood as a State of Sin
     School
     My Scholastic Acquirements
     Schoolmasters of Genius
     What We Do Not Teach, and Why
     Taboo in Schools
     Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools
     What is to be Done?
     Children's Rights and Duties
     Should Children Earn their Living?
     Children's Happiness
     The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday
     University Schoolboyishness
     The New Laziness
     The Infinite School Task
     The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge
     English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual Cowardice
     The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness
     The Common Sense of Toleration
     The Sin of Athanasius
     The Experiment Experimenting
     Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport
     Antichrist
     Under the Whip
     Technical Instruction
     Docility and Dependence
     The Abuse of Docility
     The Schoolboy and the Homeboy
     The Comings of Age of Children
     The Conflict of Wills
     The Demagogue's Opportunity
     Our Quarrelsomeness
     We Must Reform Society before we can Reform Ourselves
     The Pursuit of Manners
     Not too much Wind on the Heath, Brother
     Wanted:  a Child's Magna Charta
     The Pursuit of Learning
     Children and Game:  a Proposal
     The Parents' Intolerable Burden
     Mobilization
     Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs
     How Little We Know About Our Parents
     Our Abandoned Mothers
     Family Affection
     The Fate of the Family
     Family Mourning
     Art Teaching
     The Impossibility of Secular Education
     Natural Selection as a Religion
     Moral Instruction Leagues
     The Bible
     Artist Idolatry
     "The Machine"
     The Provocation to Anarchism
     Imagination
     Government by Bullies




PARENTS AND CHILDREN



Trailing Clouds of Glory

Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of
the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Force
either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very low
organisms: indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba is
immortal. Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer than
their friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants are believed to
be capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human inhabitant. But
the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves that they are not
immortal. Do away with death and you do away with the need for birth: in
fact if you went on breeding, you would finally have to kill old people
to make room for young ones.

Now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the Life
Force. People with no imagination try to make things which will last for
ever, and even want to live for ever themselves. But the intelligently
imaginative man knows very well that it is waste of labor to make a
machine that will last ten years, because it will probably be superseded
in half that time by an improved machine answering the same purpose.
He also knows that if some devil were to convince us that our dream
of personal immortality is no dream but a hard fact, such a shriek of
despair would go up from the human race as no other conceivable horror
could provoke. With all our perverse nonsense as to John Smith living
for a thousand million eons and for ever after, we die voluntarily,
knowing that it is time for us to be scrapped, to be remanufactured, to
come back, as Wordsworth divined, trailing ever brightening clouds of
glory. We must all be born again, and yet again and again. We should
like to live a little longer just as we should like 50 pounds: that is,
we should take it if we could get it for nothing; but that sort of idle
liking is not will. It is amazing--considering the way we talk--how
little a man will do to get 50 pounds: all the 50-pound notes I have
ever known of have been more easily earned than a laborious sixpence;
but the difficulty of inducing a man to make any serious effort to
obtain 50 pounds is nothing to the difficulty of inducing him to make a
serious effort to keep alive. The moment he sees death approach, he gets
into bed and sends for a doctor. He knows very well at the back of
his conscience that he is rather a poor job and had better be
remanufactured. He knows that his death will make room for a birth; and
he hopes that it will be a birth of something that he aspired to be and
fell short of. He knows that it is through death and rebirth that
this corruptible shall become incorruptible, and this mortal put on
immortality. Practise as you will on his ignorance, his fears, and his
imagination, with bribes of paradises and threats of hells, there is
only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its
victory; and that is the belief that we can lay down the burden of our
wretched little makeshift individualities for ever at each lift towards
the goal of evolution, which can only be a being that cannot be improved
upon. After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of
believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to
himself? Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be made
perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be myself,
nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present imperfections (and
what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that you may just as well
give me a new name and face the fact that I am a new person and that
the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton. Thus, oddly enough, the
conventional belief in the matter comes to this: that if you wish to
live for ever you must be wicked enough to be irretrievably damned,
since the saved are no longer what they were, and in hell alone do
people retain their sinful nature: that is to say, their individuality.
And this sort of hell, however convenient as a means of intimidating
persons who have practically no honor and no conscience, is not a fact.
Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way
out, not outside on the way in. Therefore let us give up telling one
another idle stories, and rejoice in death as we rejoice in birth; for
without death we cannot be born again; and the man who does not wish
to be born again and born better is fit only to represent the City of
London in Parliament, or perhaps the university of Oxford.




The Child is Father to the Man

Is he? Then in the name of common sense why do we always treat children
on the assumption that the man is father to the child? Oh, these
fathers! And we are not content with fathers: we must have godfathers,
forgetting that the child is godfather to the man. Has it ever struck
you as curious that in a country where the first article of belief is
that every child is born with a godfather whom we all call "our father
which art in heaven," two very limited individual mortals should
be allowed to appear at its baptism and explain that they are its
godparents, and that they will look after its salvation until it is no
longer a child. I had a godmother who made herself responsible in this
way for me. She presented me with a Bible with a gilt clasp and edges,
larger than the Bibles similarly presented to my sisters, because my sex
entitled me to a heavier article. I must have seen that lady at least
four times in the twenty years following. She never alluded to my
salvation in any way. People occasionally ask me to act as godfather to
their children with a levity which convinces me that they have not the
faintest notion that it involves anything more than calling the helpless
child George Bernard without regard to the possibility that it may grow
up in the liveliest abhorrence of my notions.

A person with a turn for logic might argue that if God is the Father of
all men, and if the child is father to the man, it follows that the true
representative of God at the christening is the child itself. But such
posers are unpopular, because they imply that our little customs, or,
as we often call them, our religion, mean something, or must originally
have meant something, and that we understand and believe that something.

However, my business is not to make confusion worse confounded, but to
clear it up. Only, it is as well to begin by a sample of current thought
and practice which shews that on the subject of children we are very
deeply confused. On the whole, whatever our theory or no theory may
be, our practice is to treat the child as the property of its immediate
physical parents, and to allow them to do what they like with it as far
as it will let them. It has no rights and no liberties: in short, its
condition is that which adults recognize as the most miserable and
dangerous politically possible for themselves: namely, the condition of
slavery. For its alleviation we trust to the natural affection of the
parties, and to public opinion. A father cannot for his own credit let
his son go in rags. Also, in a very large section of the population,
parents finally become dependent on their children. Thus there are
checks on child slavery which do not exist, or are less powerful, in the
case of manual and industrial slavery. Sensationally bad cases fall into
two classes, which are really the same class: namely, the children
whose parents are excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of petting
children, and the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the
sensual luxury of physically torturing them. There is a Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children which has effectually made an end of
our belief that mothers are any more to be trusted than stepmothers, or
fathers than slave-drivers. And there is a growing body of law designed
to prevent parents from using their children ruthlessly to make money
for the household. Such legislation has always been furiously resisted
by the parents, even when the horrors of factory slavery were at
their worst; and the extension of such legislation at present would be
impossible if it were not that the parents affected by it cannot control
a majority of votes in Parliament. In domestic life a great deal of
service is done by children, the girls acting as nursemaids and general
servants, and the lads as errand boys. In the country both boys and
girls do a substantial share of farm labor. This is why it is necessary
to coerce poor parents to send their children to school, though in the
relatively small class which keeps plenty of servants it is impossible
to induce parents to keep their children at home instead of paying
schoolmasters to take them off their hands.

It appears then that the bond of affection between parents and children
does not save children from the slavery that denial of rights involves
in adult political relations. It sometimes intensifies it, sometimes
mitigates it; but on the whole children and parents confront one another
as two classes in which all the political power is on one side; and
the results are not at all unlike what they would be if there were no
immediate consanguinity between them, and one were white and the other
black, or one enfranchised and the other disenfranchised, or one ranked
as gentle and the other simple. Not that Nature counts for nothing in
the case and political rights for everything. But a denial of political
rights, and the resultant delivery of one class into the mastery of
another, affects their relations so extensively and profoundly that it
is impossible to ascertain what the real natural relations of the two
classes are until this political relation is abolished.




What is a Child?

An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect:
that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment
if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of
your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman.
If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be
played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to make money
for you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight its way through
in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts will
resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance; but if you
begin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn them for your own
purposes, then there is hardly any limit to the mischief you may do.
Swear at a child, throw your boots at it, send it flying from the room
with a cuff or a kick; and the experience will be as instructive to the
child as a difficulty with a short-tempered dog or a bull. Francis Place
tells us that his father always struck his children when he found one
within his reach. The effect on the young Places seems to have been
simply to make them keep out of their father's way, which was no doubt
what he desired, as far as he desired anything at all. Francis records
the habit without bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his
father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of
it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to his
country as that rare and admirable thing, a Freethinker: the only
sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose
religious convictions, command any respect.

Now Mr Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father; and
I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as compared
with the conventional good father who deliberately imposes himself on
his son as a god; who takes advantage of childish credulity and parent
worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is right and what
he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct on the
child by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and eulogies,
for which he claims divine sanction: compared to this sort of
abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost as a
Providence. Not that it is possible to live with children any more than
with grown-up people without imposing rules of conduct on them. There
is a point at which every person with human nerves has to say to a child
"Stop that noise." But suppose the child asks why! There are various
answers in use. The simplest: "Because it irritates me," may fail; for
it may strike the child as being rather amusing to irritate you; also
the child, having comparatively no nerves, may be unable to conceive
your meaning vividly enough. In any case it may want to make a noise
more than to spare your feelings. You may therefore have to explain
that the effect of the irritation will be that you will do something
unpleasant if the noise continues. The something unpleasant may be only
a look of suffering to rouse the child's affectionate sympathy (if it
has any), or it may run to forcible expulsion from the room with plenty
of unnecessary violence; but the principle is the same: there are no
false pretences involved: the child learns in a straightforward way that
it does not pay to be inconsiderate. Also, perhaps, that Mamma, who made
the child learn the Sermon on the Mount, is not really a Christian.




The Sin of Nadab and Abihu

But there is another sort of answer in wide use which is neither
straightforward, instructive, nor harmless. In its simplest form it
substitutes for "Stop that noise," "Dont be naughty," which means that
the child, instead of annoying you by a perfectly healthy and natural
infantile procedure, is offending God. This is a blasphemous lie; and
the fact that it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does not excuse it
in the least. Dickens tells us of a nurserymaid who elaborated it into
"If you do that, angels wont never love you." I remember a servant who
used to tell me that if I were not good, by which she meant if I did
not behave with a single eye to her personal convenience, the cock would
come down the chimney. Less imaginative but equally dishonest people
told me I should go to hell if I did not make myself agreeable to them.
Bodily violence, provided it be the hasty expression of normal provoked
resentment and not vicious cruelty, cannot harm a child as this sort of
pious fraud harms it. There is a legal limit to physical cruelty; and
there are also human limits to it. There is an active Society which
brings to book a good many parents who starve and torture and overwork
their children, and intimidates a good many more. When parents of this
type are caught, they are treated as criminals; and not infrequently
the police have some trouble to save them from being lynched. The
people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devote
themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is
called bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows
the way a child should go. All the ways discovered so far lead to the
horrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by
Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another
for scraps of food. Pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that precious
and sacred thing the child's conscience into an instrument of our own
convenience, and to use that wonderful and terrible power called Shame
to grind our own axe. It is the sin of stealing fire from the altar: a
sin so impudently practised by popes, parents, and pedagogues, that one
can hardly expect the nurserymaids to see any harm in stealing a few
cinders when they are worrited.

Into the blackest depths of this violation of children's souls one can
hardly bear to look; for here we find pious fraud masking the violation
of the body by obscene cruelty. Any parent or school teacher who takes
a secret and abominable delight in torture is allowed to lay traps into
which every child must fall, and then beat it to his or her heart's
content. A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obvious
conviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded, that the
only thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience and
perfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said, he must insist. As
one of them is not a virtue at all, and the other is the attribute of a
god, one can imagine what the lives of this gentleman's children would
have been if it had been possible for him to live down to his monstrous
and foolish pretensions. And yet he might have written his letter to The
Times (he very nearly did, by the way) without incurring any danger of
being removed to an asylum, or even losing his reputation for taking
a very proper view of his parental duties. And at least it was not a
trivial view, nor an ill meant one. It was much more respectable than
the general consensus of opinion that if a school teacher can devise a
question a child cannot answer, or overhear it calling omega omeega,
he or she may beat the child viciously. Only, the cruelty must be
whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretence of reluctance. It must be
for the child's good. The assailant must say "This hurts me more than
it hurts you." There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The injury to
the child would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly "I beat you
because I like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I can contrive
an excuse for it." But to represent this detestable lust to the child
as Divine wrath, and the cruelty as the beneficent act of God, which is
exactly what all our floggers do, is to add to the torture of the body,
out of which the flogger at least gets some pleasure, the maiming and
blinding of the child's soul, which can bring nothing but horror to
anyone.




The Manufacture of Monsters

This industry is by no means peculiar to China. The Chinese (they say)
make physical monsters. We revile them for it and proceed to make moral
monsters of our own children. The most excusable parents are those who
try to correct their own faults in their offspring. The parent who says
to his child: "I am one of the successes of the Almighty: therefore
imitate me in every particular or I will have the skin off your back"
(a quite common attitude) is a much more absurd figure than the man who,
with a pipe in his mouth, thrashes his boy for smoking. If you must hold
yourself up to your children as an object lesson (which is not at all
necessary), hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example. But
you had much better let the child's character alone. If you once allow
yourself to regard a child as so much material for you to manufacture
into any shape that happens to suit your fancy you are defeating the
experiment of the Life Force. You are assuming that the child does
not know its own business, and that you do. In this you are sure to be
wrong: the child feels the drive of the Life Force (often called the
Will of God); and you cannot feel it for him. Handel's parents no doubt
thought they knew better than their child when they tried to prevent
his becoming a musician. They would have been equally wrong and equally
unsuccessful if they had tried to prevent the child becoming a great
rascal had its genius lain in that direction. Handel would have been
Handel, and Napoleon and Peter of Russia _them_selves in spite of all
the parents in creation, because, as often happens, they were stronger
than their parents. But this does not happen always. Most children
can be, and many are, hopelessly warped and wasted by parents who are
ignorant and silly enough to suppose that they know what a human being
ought to be, and who stick at nothing in their determination to force
their children into their moulds. Every child has a right to its own
bent. It has a right to be a Plymouth Brother though its parents be
convinced atheists. It has a right to dislike its mother or father or
sister or brother or uncle or aunt if they are antipathetic to it. It
has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way
seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right
to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it
were its own father.




Small and Large Families

These rights have now become more important than they used to be,
because the modern practice of limiting families enables them to be
more effectually violated. In a family of ten, eight, six, or even four
children, the rights of the younger ones to a great extent take care of
themselves and of the rights of the elder ones too. Two adult parents,
in spite of a house to keep and an income to earn, can still interfere
to a disastrous extent with the rights and liberties of one child. But
by the time a fourth child has arrived, they are not only outnumbered
two to one, but are getting tired of the thankless and mischievous job
of bringing up their children in the way they think they should go. The
old observation that members of large families get on in the world
holds good because in large families it is impossible for each child to
receive what schoolmasters call "individual attention." The children
may receive a good deal of individual attention from one another in the
shape of outspoken reproach, ruthless ridicule, and violent resistance
to their attempts at aggression; but the parental despots are compelled
by the multitude of their subjects to resort to political rather than
personal rule, and to spread their attempts at moral monster-making over
so many children, that each child has enough freedom, and enough sport
in the prophylactic process of laughing at its elders behind their
backs, to escape with much less damage than the single child. In a large
school the system may be bad; but the personal influence of the head
master has to be exerted, when it is exerted at all, in a public way,
because he has little more power of working on the affections of the
individual scholar in the intimate way that, for example, the mother
of a single child can, than the prime minister has of working on the
affections of any individual voter.




Children as Nuisances

Experienced parents, when children's rights are preached to them, very
naturally ask whether children are to be allowed to do what they like.
The best reply is to ask whether adults are to be allowed to do what
they like. The two cases are the same. The adult who is nasty is not
allowed to do what he likes: neither can the child who likes to be
nasty. There is no difference in principle between the rights of a
child and those of an adult: the difference in their cases is one of
circumstance. An adult is not supposed to be punished except by process
of law; nor, when he is so punished, is the person whom he has injured
allowed to act as judge, jury, and executioner. It is true that
employers do act in this way every day to their workpeople; but this is
not a justified and intended part of the situation: it is an abuse
of Capitalism which nobody defends in principle. As between child and
parent or nurse it is not argued about because it is inevitable. You
cannot hold an impartial judicial inquiry every time a child misbehaves
itself. To allow the child to misbehave without instantly making it
unpleasantly conscious of the fact would be to spoil it. The adult has
therefore to take action of some sort with nothing but his conscience
to shield the child from injustice or unkindness. The action may be a
torrent of scolding culminating in a furious smack causing terror
and pain, or it may be a remonstrance causing remorse, or it may be a
sarcasm causing shame and humiliation, or it may be a sermon causing the
child to believe that it is a little reprobate on the road to hell. The
child has no defence in any case except the kindness and conscience of
the adult; and the adult had better not forget this; for it involves a
heavy responsibility.

And now comes our difficulty. The responsibility, being so heavy, cannot
be discharged by persons of feeble character or intelligence. And yet
people of high character and intelligence cannot be plagued with the
care of children. A child is a restless, noisy little animal, with
an insatiable appetite for knowledge, and consequently a maddening
persistence in asking questions. If the child is to remain in the room
with a highly intelligent and sensitive adult, it must be told, and if
necessary forced, to sit still and not speak, which is injurious to
its health, unnatural, unjust, and therefore cruel and selfish beyond
toleration. Consequently the highly intelligent and sensitive adult
hands the child over to a nurserymaid who has no nerves and can
therefore stand more noise, but who has also no scruples, and may
therefore be very bad company for the child.

Here we have come to the central fact of the question: a fact nobody
avows, which is yet the true explanation of the monstrous system of
child imprisonment and torture which we disguise under such hypocrisies
as education, training, formation of character and the rest of it. This
fact is simply that a child is a nuisance to a grown-up person. What
is more, the nuisance becomes more and more intolerable as the grown-up
person becomes more cultivated, more sensitive, and more deeply engaged
in the highest methods of adult work. The child at play is noisy and
ought to be noisy: Sir Isaac Newton at work is quiet and ought to be
quiet. And the child should spend most of its time at play, whilst the
adult should spend most of his time at work. I am not now writing on
behalf of persons who coddle themselves into a ridiculous condition of
nervous feebleness, and at last imagine themselves unable to work
under conditions of bustle which to healthy people are cheerful and
stimulating. I am sure that if people had to choose between living where
the noise of children never stopped and where it was never heard, all
the goodnatured and sound people would prefer the incessant noise to the
incessant silence. But that choice is not thrust upon us by the nature
of things. There is no reason why children and adults should not see
just as much of one another as is good for them, no more and no less.
Even at present you are not compelled to choose between sending your
child to a boarding school (which means getting rid of it altogether on
more or less hypocritical pretences) and keeping it continually at home.
Most working folk today either send their children to day schools or
turn them out of doors. This solves the problem for the parents. It does
not solve it for the children, any more than the tethering of a goat in
a field or the chasing of an unlicensed dog into the streets solves
it for the goat or the dog; but it shews that in no class are people
willing to endure the society of their children, and consequently
that it is an error to believe that the family provides children with
edifying adult society, or that the family is a social unit. The family
is in that, as in so many other respects, a humbug. Old people and young
people cannot walk at the same pace without distress and final loss of
health to one of the parties. When they are sitting indoors they cannot
endure the same degrees of temperature and the same supplies of
fresh air. Even if the main factors of noise, restlessness, and
inquisitiveness are left out of account, children can stand with
indifference sights, sounds, smells, and disorders that would make an
adult of fifty utterly miserable; whilst on the other hand such
adults find a tranquil happiness in conditions which to children mean
unspeakable boredom. And since our system is nevertheless to pack them
all into the same house and pretend that they are happy, and that this
particular sort of happiness is the foundation of virtue, it is found
that in discussing family life we never speak of actual adults or actual
children, or of realities of any sort, but always of ideals such as
The Home, a Mother's Influence, a Father's Care, Filial Piety, Duty,
Affection, Family Life, etc. etc., which are no doubt very comforting
phrases, but which beg the question of what a home and a mother's
influence and a father's care and so forth really come to in practice.
How many hours a week of the time when his children are out of bed does
the ordinary bread-winning father spend in the company of his children
or even in the same building with them? The home may be a thieves'
kitchen, the mother a procuress, the father a violent drunkard; or the
mother and father may be fashionable people who see their children three
or four times a year during the holidays, and then not oftener than
they can help, living meanwhile in daily and intimate contact with their
valets and lady's-maids, whose influence and care are often dominant in
the household. Affection, as distinguished from simple kindliness, may
or may not exist: when it does it either depends on qualities in the
parties that would produce it equally if they were of no kin to one
another, or it is a more or less morbid survival of the nursing passion;
for affection between adults (if they are really adult in mind and not
merely grown-up children) and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel
as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be
called natural: in fact the evidence shews that it is easier to love the
company of a dog than of a commonplace child between the ages of six and
the beginnings of controlled maturity; for women who cannot bear to be
separated from their pet dogs send their children to boarding schools
cheerfully. They may say and even believe that in allowing their
children to leave home they are sacrificing themselves for their
children's good; but there are very few pet dogs who would not be
the better for a month or two spent elsewhere than in a lady's lap or
roasting on a drawingroom hearthrug. Besides, to allege that children
are better continually away from home is to give up the whole popular
sentimental theory of the family; yet the dogs are kept and the children
are banished.




Child Fanciers

There is, however, a good deal of spurious family affection. There is
the clannishness that will make a dozen brothers and sisters who quarrel
furiously among themselves close up their ranks and make common cause
against a brother-in-law or a sister-in-law. And there is a strong sense
of property in children, which often makes mothers and fathers bitterly
jealous of allowing anyone else to interfere with their children, whom
they may none the less treat very badly. And there is an extremely
dangerous craze for children which leads certain people to establish
orphanages and baby farms and schools, seizing any pretext for filling
their houses with children exactly as some eccentric old ladies and
gentlemen fill theirs with cats. In such places the children are the
victims of all the caprices of doting affection and all the excesses
of lascivious cruelty. Yet the people who have this morbid craze seldom
have any difficulty in finding victims. Parents and guardians are so
worried by children and so anxious to get rid of them that anyone who
is willing to take them off their hands is welcomed and whitewashed.
The very people who read with indignation of Squeers and Creakle in the
novels of Dickens are quite ready to hand over their own children
to Squeers and Creakle, and to pretend that Squeers and Creakle
are monsters of the past. But read the autobiography of Stanley the
traveller, or sit in the company of men talking about their school-days,
and you will soon find that fiction, which must, if it is to be sold and
read, stop short of being positively sickening, dare not tell the whole
truth about the people to whom children are handed over on educational
pretexts. Not very long ago a schoolmaster in Ireland was murdered by
his boys; and for reasons which were never made public it was at
first decided not to prosecute the murderers. Yet all these flogging
schoolmasters and orphanage fiends and baby farmers are "lovers of
children." They are really child fanciers (like bird fanciers or dog
fanciers) by irresistible natural predilection, never happy unless they
are surrounded by their victims, and always certain to make their living
by accepting the custody of children, no matter how many alternative
occupations may be available. And bear in mind that they are only
the extreme instances of what is commonly called natural affection,
apparently because it is obviously unnatural.

The really natural feeling of adults for children in the long prosaic
intervals between the moments of affectionate impulse is just that
feeling that leads them to avoid their care and constant company as a
burden beyond bearing, and to pretend that the places they send them to
are well conducted, beneficial, and indispensable to the success of the
children in after life. The true cry of the kind mother after her little
rosary of kisses is "Run away, darling." It is nicer than "Hold
your noise, you young devil; or it will be the worse for you"; but
fundamentally it means the same thing: that if you compel an adult and
a child to live in one another's company either the adult or the child
will be miserable. There is nothing whatever unnatural or wrong or
shocking in this fact; and there is no harm in it if only it be sensibly
faced and provided for. The mischief that it does at present is
produced by our efforts to ignore it, or to smother it under a heap of
sentimental lies and false pretences.




Childhood as a State of Sin

Unfortunately all this nonsense tends to accumulate as we become more
sympathetic. In many families it is still the custom to treat childhood
frankly as a state of sin, and impudently proclaim the monstrous
principle that little children should be seen and not heard, and to
enforce a set of prison rules designed solely to make cohabitation
with children as convenient as possible for adults without the smallest
regard for the interests, either remote or immediate, of the
children. This system tends to produce a tough, rather brutal, stupid,
unscrupulous class, with a fixed idea that all enjoyment consists in
undetected sinning; and in certain phases of civilization people of this
kind are apt to get the upper hand of more amiable and conscientious
races and classes. They have the ferocity of a chained dog, and are
proud of it. But the end of it is that they are always in chains,
even at the height of their military or political success: they
win everything on condition that they are afraid to enjoy it. Their
civilizations rest on intimidation, which is so necessary to them that
when they cannot find anybody brave enough to intimidate them they
intimidate themselves and live in a continual moral and political panic.
In the end they get found out and bullied. But that is not the point
that concerns us here, which is, that they are in some respects better
brought up than the children of sentimental people who are always
anxious and miserable about their duty to their children, and who end
by neither making their children happy nor having a tolerable life for
themselves. A selfish tyrant you know where to have, and he (or she) at
least does not confuse your affections; but a conscientious and kindly
meddler may literally worry you out of your senses. It is fortunate that
only very few parents are capable of doing what they conceive their duty
continuously or even at all, and that still fewer are tough enough to
ride roughshod over their children at home.




School

But please observe the limitation "at home." What private amateur
parental enterprise cannot do may be done very effectively by organized
professional enterprise in large institutions established for the
purpose. And it is to such professional enterprise that parents hand
over their children when they can afford it. They send their children
to school; and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for
innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison.
But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for
instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and
the governor (who of course would not be warders and governors if they
could write readable books), and beaten or otherwise tormented if you
cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the prison you
are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or
interest on subjects that they dont understand and dont care about, and
are therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a
prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains;
and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellow
prisoners. In a school you have none of these advantages. With the
world's bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the very
manna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to read
a hideous imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannot
write: a book from which no human being can learn anything: a book
which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense
read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of
a book all the rest of your life. With millions of acres of woods and
valleys and hills and wind and air and birds and streams and fishes and
all sorts of instructive and healthy things easily accessible, or with
streets and shop windows and crowds and vehicles and all sorts of city
delights at the door, you are forced to sit, not in a room with some
human grace and comfort or furniture and decoration, but in a stalled
pound with a lot of other children, beaten if you talk, beaten if you
move, beaten if you cannot prove by answering idiotic questions that
even when you escaped from the pound and from the eye of your gaoler,
you were still agonizing over his detestable sham books instead of
daring to live. And your childish hatred of your gaoler and flogger is
nothing to his adult hatred of you; for he is a slave forced to endure
your society for his daily bread. You have not even the satisfaction of
knowing how you are torturing him and how he loathes you; and you give
yourself unnecessary pains to annoy him with furtive tricks and spiteful
doing of forbidden things. No wonder he is sometimes provoked to
fiendish outbursts of wrath. No wonder men of downright sense, like Dr
Johnson, admit that under such circumstances children will not learn
anything unless they are so cruelly beaten that they make desperate
efforts to memorize words and phrases to escape flagellation. It is a
ghastly business, quite beyond words, this schooling.

And now I hear cries of protest arising all round. First my own
schoolmasters, or their ghosts, asking whether I was cruelly beaten at
school? No; but then I did not learn anything at school. Dr Johnson's
schoolmaster presumably did care enough whether Sam learned anything to
beat him savagely enough to force him to lame his mind--for
Johnson's great mind _was_ lamed--by learning his lessons. None of my
schoolmasters really cared a rap (or perhaps it would be fairer to them
to say that their employers did not care a rap and therefore did not
give them the necessary caning powers) whether I learnt my lessons or
not, provided my father paid my schooling bill, the collection of which
was the real object of the school. Consequently I did not learn my
school lessons, having much more important ones in hand, with the result
that I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns
as Johnson did when he should have been shaking England with the thunder
of his spirit. My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good
whatever: it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt; but I
escaped Squeers and Creakle just as I escaped Johnson and Carlyle. And
this is what happens to most of us. We are not effectively coerced to
learn: we stave off punishment as far as we can by lying and trickery
and guessing and using our wits; and when this does not suffice we
scribble impositions, or suffer extra imprisonments--"keeping in" was
the phrase in my time--or let a master strike us with a cane and fall
back on our pride at being able to hear it physically (he not being
allowed to hit us too hard) to outface the dishonor we should have been
taught to die rather than endure. And so idleness and worthlessness on
the one hand and a pretence of coercion on the other became a despicable
routine. If my schoolmasters had been really engaged in educating me
instead of painfully earning their bread by keeping me from annoying my
elders they would have turned me out of the school, telling me that I
was thoroughly disloyal to it; that I had no intention of learning; that
I was mocking and distracting the boys who did wish to learn; that I was
a liar and a shirker and a seditious little nuisance; and that nothing
could injure me in character and degrade their occupation more than
allowing me (much less forcing me) to remain in the school under such
conditions. But in order to get expelled, it was necessary commit
a crime of such atrocity that the parents of other boys would
have threatened to remove their sons sooner than allow them to be
schoolfellows with the delinquent. I can remember only one case in which
such a penalty was threatened; and in that case the culprit, a boarder,
had kissed a housemaid, or possibly, being a handsome youth, been kissed
by her. She did not kiss me; and nobody ever dreamt of expelling me. The
truth was, a boy meant just so much a year to the institution. That was
why he was kept there against his will. That was why he was kept there
when his expulsion would have been an unspeakable relief and benefit
both to his teachers and himself.

It may be argued that if the uncommercial attitude had been taken,
and all the disloyal wasters and idlers shewn sternly to the door,
the school would not have been emptied, but filled. But so honest an
attitude was impossible. The masters must have hated the school much
more than the boys did. Just as you cannot imprison a man without
imprisoning a warder to see that he does not escape, the warder being
tied to the prison as effectually by the fear of unemployment and
starvation as the prisoner is by the bolts and bars, so these poor
schoolmasters, with their small salaries and large classes, were as much
prisoners as we were, and much more responsible and anxious ones. They
could not impose the heroic attitude on their employers; nor would they
have been able to obtain places as schoolmasters if their habits had
been heroic. For the best of them their employment was provisional: they
looked forward to escaping from it into the pulpit. The ablest and most
impatient of them were often so irritated by the awkward, slow-witted,
slovenly boys: that is, the ones that required special consideration and
patient treatment, that they vented their irritation on them ruthlessly,
nothing being easier than to entrap or bewilder such a boy into giving a
pretext for punishing him.




My Scholastic Acquirements

The results, as far as I was concerned, were what might have been
expected. My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything
but Latin and Greek. When I went there as a very small boy I knew a good
deal of Latin grammar which I had been taught in a few weeks privately
by my uncle. When I had been several years at school this same uncle
examined me and discovered that the net result of my schooling was that
I had forgotten what he had taught me, and had learnt nothing else. To
this day, though I can still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of the
old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks
to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could
translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater
part of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, as to classical education,
another Shakespear. I can read French as easily as English; and under
pressure of necessity I can turn to account some scraps of German and
a little operatic Italian; but these I was never taught at school.
Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty
stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as
obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the
blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards. And
if I had been a boarder at an English public school instead of a day boy
at an Irish one, I might have had to add to these, deeper shames still.




Schoolmasters of Genius

And now, if I have reduced the ghosts of my schoolmasters to melancholy
acquiescence in all this (which everybody who has been at an ordinary
school will recognize as true), I have still to meet the much more
sincere protests of the handful of people who have a natural genius for
"bringing up" children. I shall be asked with kindly scorn whether I
have heard of Froebel and Pestalozzi, whether I know the work that is
being done by Miss Mason and the Dottoressa Montessori or, best of all
as I think, the Eurythmics School of Jacques Dalcroze at Hellerau near
Dresden. Jacques Dalcroze, like Plato, believes in saturating his pupils
with music. They walk to music, play to music, work to music, obey drill
commands that would bewilder a guardsman to music, think to music,
live to music, get so clearheaded about music that they can move their
several limbs each in a different metre until they become complicated
living magazines of cross rhythms, and, what is more, make music
for others to do all these things to. Stranger still, though Jacques
Dalcroze, like all these great teachers, is the completest of tyrants,
knowing what is right and that he must and will have the lesson just so
or else break his heart (not somebody else's, observe), yet his school
is so fascinating that every woman who sees it exclaims "Oh, why was I
not taught like this!" and elderly gentlemen excitedly enrol themselves
as students and distract classes of infants by their desperate endeavors
to beat two in a bar with one hand and three with the other, and start
off on earnest walks round the room, taking two steps backward whenever
Monsieur Daleroze calls out "Hop!" Oh yes: I know all about these
wonderful schools that you cannot keep children or even adults out of,
and these teachers whom their pupils not only obey without coercion, but
adore. And if you will tell me roughly how many Masons and Montessoris
and Dalcrozes you think you can pick up in Europe for salaries of from
thirty shillings to five pounds a week, I will estimate your chances
of converting your millions of little scholastic hells into little
scholastic heavens. If you are a distressed gentlewoman starting to make
a living, you can still open a little school; and you can easily buy a
secondhand brass plate inscribed PESTALOZZIAN INSTITUTE and nail it to
your door, though you have no more idea of who Pestalozzi was and what
he advocated or how he did it than the manager of a hotel which began
as a Hydropathic has of the water cure. Or you can buy a cheaper plate
inscribed KINDERGARTEN, and imagine, or leave others to imagine, that
Froebel is the governing genius of your little _creche_. No doubt the
new brass plates are being inscribed Montessori Institute, and will be
used when the Dotteressa is no longer with us by all the Mrs Pipchins
and Mrs Wilfers throughout this unhappy land.

I will go further, and admit that the brass plates may not all be
frauds. I will tell you that one of my friends was led to genuine
love and considerable knowledge of classical literature by an Irish
schoolmaster whom you would call a hedge schoolmaster (he would not be
allowed to teach anything now) and that it took four years of Harrow
to obliterate that knowledge and change the love into loathing. Another
friend of mine who keeps a school in the suburbs, and who deeply
deplores my "prejudice against schoolmasters," has offered to accept my
challenge to tell his pupils that they are as free to get up and go out
of the school at any moment as their parents are to get up and go out
of a theatre where my plays are being performed. Even among my own
schoolmasters I can recollect a few whose classes interested me, and
whom I should certainly have pestered for information and instruction
if I could have got into any decent human relationship with them, and
if they had not been compelled by their position to defend themselves as
carefully against such advances as against furtive attempts to hurt them
accidentally in the football field or smash their hats with a clod from
behind a wall. But these rare cases actually do more harm than good; for
they encourage us to pretend that all schoolmasters are like that.
Of what use is it to us that there are always somewhere two or three
teachers of children whose specific genius for their occupation triumphs
over our tyrannous system and even finds in it its opportunity? For that
matter, it is possible, if difficult, to find a solicitor, or even a
judge, who has some notion of what law means, a doctor with a glimmering
of science, an officer who understands duty and discipline, and a
clergyman with an inkling of religion, though there are nothing like
enough of them to go round. But even the few who, like Ibsen's Mrs
Solness, have "a genius for nursing the souls of little children" are
like angels forced to work in prisons instead of in heaven; and even
at that they are mostly underpaid and despised. That friend of mine who
went from the hedge schoolmaster to Harrow once saw a schoolmaster rush
from an elementary school in pursuit of a boy and strike him. My friend,
not considering that the unfortunate man was probably goaded
beyond endurance, smote the schoolmaster and blackened his eye. The
schoolmaster appealed to the law; and my friend found himself waiting
nervously in the Hammersmith Police Court to answer for his breach of
the peace. In his anxiety he asked a police officer what would happen
to him. "What did you do?" said the officer. "I gave a man a black eye"
said my friend. "Six pounds if he was a gentleman: two pounds if he
wasnt," said the constable. "He was a schoolmaster" said my friend. "Two
pounds" said the officer; and two pounds it was. The blood money was
paid cheerfully; and I have ever since advised elementary schoolmasters
to qualify themselves in the art of self-defence, as the British
Constitution expresses our national estimate of them by allowing us to
blacken three of their eyes for the same price as one of an ordinary
professional man. How many Froebels and Pestalozzis and Miss Masons and
Doctoress Montessoris would you be likely to get on these terms even if
they occurred much more frequently in nature than they actually do?