The child's rights, being clearly those of any other human being, are summed up in the right to live.... And the rights of society over it clearly extend to requiring it to qualify itself to live in society without wasting other people's time.... 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. In dealing with children what is needed is not logic but sense. 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.... And what is a tyrant? Quite simply a person who says to another person, young or old, "You shall do as I tell you." Children are extremely cruel without intending it; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they do not conceive their elders as having any human feeling. Serve the elders right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of the imposter is not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but that he is taken for what he pretends to be and treated as such. The family ideal is a humbug and a nuisance: one might as reasonably talk of the barrack ideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any other substitution of the machinery of social for the end of it, which must always be the fullest and most capable life: in short, the most Godly life. Even apart from its insufferable pretensions, the family needs hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable part of it that could not be amputated with advantage. Do not for a moment suppose that uncultivated people are merely indifferent to high and noble qualities. They hate them malignantly.... Whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years, but of 21 seconds. You may have as much fun at Shaw's expense as you want on the grounds that he has never had to train a child and therefore doesn't know the difficulties. But if you want to laugh last don't read this preface or the play that follows it, because he will make a laughing-stock or a convert of you as surely as he will prove that he is far cleverer than you can ever hope to be.