A Treatise on Parents and Children

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.