A Treatise on Parents and Children

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.