A Treatise on Parents and Children

Docility may survive as a lazy habit long after it has ceased to be a / beneficial instinct. If you catch a child when it is young enough to be / instinctively docile, and keep it in a condition of unremitted tutelage / under the nurserymaid, the governess, the preparatory school, the / secondary school, and the university, until it is an adult, you will / produce, not a self-reliant, free, fully matured human being, but a / grown-up schoolboy or schoolgirl, capable of nothing in the way of / original or independent action except outbursts of naughtiness in the / women and blackguardism in the men. That is exactly what we get at / present in our rich and consequently governing classes: they pass from / juvenility to senility without ever touching maturity except in body. / The classes which cannot afford this sustained tutelage are notably more / self-reliant and grown-up: an office boy of fifteen is often more of a / man than a university student of twenty. Unfortunately this precocity / is disabled by poverty, ignorance, narrowness, and a hideous power of / living without art or love or beauty and being rather proud of it. The / poor never escape from servitude: their docility is preserved by their / slavery. And so all become the prey of the greedy, the selfish, the / domineering, the unscrupulous, the predatory. If here and there an / individual refuses to be docile, ten docile persons will beat him or / lock him up or shoot him or hang him at the bidding of his oppressors / and their own.

The crux of the whole difficulty about parents, / schoolmasters, priests, absolute monarchs, and despots of every sort, / is the tendency to abuse natural docility. A nation should always be / healthily rebellious; but the king or prime minister has yet to be found / who will make trouble by cultivating that side of the national spirit. A / child should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself more / and more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and / conduct; yet as nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppish / child, it is useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcate / this uppishness. Such unamiable precepts as Always contradict an / authoritative statement, Always return a blow, Never lose a chance of a / good fight, When you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who scolds / you whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose, and follow the / question with a blow or an insult or some other unmistakable expression / of resentment, Remember that the progress of the world depends on your / knowing better than your elders, are just as important as those of The / Sermon on the Mount; but no one has yet seen them written up in letters / of gold in a schoolroom or nursery. The child is taught to be kind, to / be respectful, to be quiet, not to answer back, to be truthful when its / elders want to find out anything from it, to lie when the truth would / shock or hurt its elders, to be above all things obedient, and to be / seen and not heard.