A Treatise on Parents and Children

And now all the modern schoolmaster abortionists will rise up beaming, / and say, "We quite agree. We regard every child in our school as a / subject for experiment. We are always experimenting with them. We / challenge the experimental test for our system. We are continually / guided by our experience in our great work of moulding the character of / our future citizens, etc. etc. etc. " I am sorry to seem irreconcilable; / but it is the Life Force that has to make the experiment and not the / schoolmaster; and the Life Force for the child's purpose is in the child / and not in the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster is another experiment; / and a laboratory in which all the experiments began experimenting on one / another would not produce intelligible results. I admit, however, that / if my schoolmasters had treated me as an experiment of the Life Force: / that is, if they had set me free to do as I liked subject only to my / political rights and theirs, they could not have watched the experiment / very long, because the first result would have been a rapid movement / on my part in the direction of the door, and my disappearance / there-through.

It may be worth inquiring where I should have gone to. I should say that / practically every time I should have gone to a much more educational / place. I should have gone into the country, or into the sea, or into the / National Gallery, or to hear a band if there was one, or to any library / where there were no schoolbooks. I should have read very dry and / difficult books: for example, though nothing would have induced me / to read the budget of stupid party lies that served as a text-book of / history in school, I remember reading Robertson's Charles V. and his / history of Scotland from end to end most laboriously. Once, stung by the / airs of a schoolfellow who alleged that he had read Locke On The Human / Understanding, I attempted to read the Bible straight through, and / actually got to the Pauline Epistles before I broke down in disgust at / what seemed to me their inveterate crookedness of mind. If there had / been a school where children were really free, I should have had to / be driven out of it for the sake of my health by the teachers; for the / children to whom a literary education can be of any use are insatiable: / they will read and study far more than is good for them. In fact the / real difficulty is to prevent them from wasting their time by reading / for the sake of reading and studying for the sake of studying, instead / of taking some trouble to find out what they really like and are capable / of doing some good at. Some silly person will probably interrupt me / here with the remark that many children have no appetite for a literary / education at all, and would never open a book if they were not forced / to.