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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account