A Treatise on Parents and Children

When we come to the positive problem of what to do with children if we / are to give up the established plan, we find the difficulties so great / that we begin to understand why so many people who detest the system and / look back with loathing on their own schooldays, must helplessly send / their children to the very schools they themselves were sent to, because / there is no alternative except abandoning the children to undisciplined / vagabondism. Man in society must do as everybody else does in his class: / only fools and romantic novices imagine that freedom is a mere matter of / the readiness of the individual to snap his fingers at convention. It / is true that most of us live in a condition of quite unnecessary / inhibition, wearing ugly and uncomfortable clothes, making ourselves and / other people miserable by the heathen horrors of mourning, staying away / from the theatre because we cannot afford the stalls and are ashamed / to go to the pit, and in dozens of other ways enslaving ourselves / when there are comfortable alternatives open to us without any real / drawbacks.

The contemplation of these petty slaveries, and of the / triumphant ease with which sensible people throw them off, creates an / impression that if we only take Johnson's advice to free our minds from / cant, we can achieve freedom. But if we all freed our minds from cant / we should find that for the most part we should have to go on doing / the necessary work of the world exactly as we did it before until we / organized new and free methods of doing it. Many people believed in / secondary co-education (boys and girls taught together) before schools / like Bedales were founded: indeed the practice was common enough in / elementary schools and in Scotland; but their belief did not help them / until Bedales and St George's were organized; and there are still not / nearly enough co-educational schools in existence to accommodate all / the children of the parents who believe in co-education up to university / age, even if they could always afford the fees of these exceptional / schools.