A Treatise on Parents and Children

G >> George Bernard Shaw >> A Treatise on Parents and Children

A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN

By Bernard Shaw



CONTENTS

Parents and Children
Trailing Clouds of Glory
The Child is Father to the Man
What is a Child?
The Sin of Nadab and Abihu
The Manufacture of Monsters
Small and Large Families
Children as Nuisances
Child Fanciers
Childhood as a State of Sin
School
My Scholastic Acquirements
Schoolmasters of Genius
What We Do Not Teach, and Why
Taboo in Schools
Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools
What is to be Done?
Children's Rights and Duties
Should Children Earn their Living?
Children's Happiness
The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday
University Schoolboyishness
The New Laziness
The Infinite School Task
The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge
English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual Cowardice
The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness
The Common Sense of Toleration
The Sin of Athanasius
The Experiment Experimenting
Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport
Antichrist
Under the Whip
Technical Instruction
Docility and Dependence
The Abuse of Docility
The Schoolboy and the Homeboy
The Comings of Age of Children
The Conflict of Wills
The Demagogue's Opportunity
Our Quarrelsomeness
We Must Reform Society before we can Reform Ourselves
The Pursuit of Manners
Not too much Wind on the Heath, Brother
Wanted: a Child's Magna Charta
The Pursuit of Learning
Children and Game: a Proposal
The Parents' Intolerable Burden
Mobilization
Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs
How Little We Know About Our Parents
Our Abandoned Mothers
Family Affection
The Fate of the Family
Family Mourning
Art Teaching
The Impossibility of Secular Education
Natural Selection as a Religion
Moral Instruction Leagues
The Bible
Artist Idolatry
"The Machine"
The Provocation to Anarchism
Imagination
Government by Bullies




PARENTS AND CHILDREN



Trailing Clouds of Glory

Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of
the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Force
either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very low
organisms: indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba is
immortal. Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer than
their friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants are believed to
be capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human inhabitant. But
the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves that they are not
immortal. Do away with death and you do away with the need for birth: in
fact if you went on breeding, you would finally have to kill old people
to make room for young ones.

Now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the Life
Force. People with no imagination try to make things which will last for
ever, and even want to live for ever themselves. But the intelligently
imaginative man knows very well that it is waste of labor to make a
machine that will last ten years, because it will probably be superseded
in half that time by an improved machine answering the same purpose.
He also knows that if some devil were to convince us that our dream
of personal immortality is no dream but a hard fact, such a shriek of
despair would go up from the human race as no other conceivable horror
could provoke. With all our perverse nonsense as to John Smith living
for a thousand million eons and for ever after, we die voluntarily,
knowing that it is time for us to be scrapped, to be remanufactured, to
come back, as Wordsworth divined, trailing ever brightening clouds of
glory. We must all be born again, and yet again and again. We should
like to live a little longer just as we should like 50 pounds: that is,
we should take it if we could get it for nothing; but that sort of idle
liking is not will. It is amazing--considering the way we talk--how
little a man will do to get 50 pounds: all the 50-pound notes I have
ever known of have been more easily earned than a laborious sixpence;
but the difficulty of inducing a man to make any serious effort to
obtain 50 pounds is nothing to the difficulty of inducing him to make a
serious effort to keep alive. The moment he sees death approach, he gets
into bed and sends for a doctor. He knows very well at the back of
his conscience that he is rather a poor job and had better be
remanufactured. He knows that his death will make room for a birth; and
he hopes that it will be a birth of something that he aspired to be and
fell short of. He knows that it is through death and rebirth that
this corruptible shall become incorruptible, and this mortal put on
immortality. Practise as you will on his ignorance, his fears, and his
imagination, with bribes of paradises and threats of hells, there is
only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its
victory; and that is the belief that we can lay down the burden of our
wretched little makeshift individualities for ever at each lift towards
the goal of evolution, which can only be a being that cannot be improved
upon. After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of
believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to
himself? Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be made
perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be myself,
nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present imperfections (and
what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that you may just as well
give me a new name and face the fact that I am a new person and that
the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton. Thus, oddly enough, the
conventional belief in the matter comes to this: that if you wish to
live for ever you must be wicked enough to be irretrievably damned,
since the saved are no longer what they were, and in hell alone do
people retain their sinful nature: that is to say, their individuality.
And this sort of hell, however convenient as a means of intimidating
persons who have practically no honor and no conscience, is not a fact.
Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way
out, not outside on the way in. Therefore let us give up telling one
another idle stories, and rejoice in death as we rejoice in birth; for
without death we cannot be born again; and the man who does not wish
to be born again and born better is fit only to represent the City of
London in Parliament, or perhaps the university of Oxford.




The Child is Father to the Man

Is he? Then in the name of common sense why do we always treat children
on the assumption that the man is father to the child? Oh, these
fathers! And we are not content with fathers: we must have godfathers,
forgetting that the child is godfather to the man. Has it ever struck
you as curious that in a country where the first article of belief is
that every child is born with a godfather whom we all call "our father
which art in heaven," two very limited individual mortals should
be allowed to appear at its baptism and explain that they are its
godparents, and that they will look after its salvation until it is no
longer a child. I had a godmother who made herself responsible in this
way for me. She presented me with a Bible with a gilt clasp and edges,
larger than the Bibles similarly presented to my sisters, because my sex
entitled me to a heavier article. I must have seen that lady at least
four times in the twenty years following. She never alluded to my
salvation in any way. People occasionally ask me to act as godfather to
their children with a levity which convinces me that they have not the
faintest notion that it involves anything more than calling the helpless
child George Bernard without regard to the possibility that it may grow
up in the liveliest abhorrence of my notions.

A person with a turn for logic might argue that if God is the Father of
all men, and if the child is father to the man, it follows that the true
representative of God at the christening is the child itself. But such
posers are unpopular, because they imply that our little customs, or,
as we often call them, our religion, mean something, or must originally
have meant something, and that we understand and believe that something.

However, my business is not to make confusion worse confounded, but to
clear it up. Only, it is as well to begin by a sample of current thought
and practice which shews that on the subject of children we are very
deeply confused. On the whole, whatever our theory or no theory may
be, our practice is to treat the child as the property of its immediate
physical parents, and to allow them to do what they like with it as far
as it will let them. It has no rights and no liberties: in short, its
condition is that which adults recognize as the most miserable and
dangerous politically possible for themselves: namely, the condition of
slavery. For its alleviation we trust to the natural affection of the
parties, and to public opinion. A father cannot for his own credit let
his son go in rags. Also, in a very large section of the population,
parents finally become dependent on their children. Thus there are
checks on child slavery which do not exist, or are less powerful, in the
case of manual and industrial slavery. Sensationally bad cases fall into
two classes, which are really the same class: namely, the children
whose parents are excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of petting
children, and the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the
sensual luxury of physically torturing them. There is a Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children which has effectually made an end of
our belief that mothers are any more to be trusted than stepmothers, or
fathers than slave-drivers. And there is a growing body of law designed
to prevent parents from using their children ruthlessly to make money
for the household. Such legislation has always been furiously resisted
by the parents, even when the horrors of factory slavery were at
their worst; and the extension of such legislation at present would be
impossible if it were not that the parents affected by it cannot control
a majority of votes in Parliament. In domestic life a great deal of
service is done by children, the girls acting as nursemaids and general
servants, and the lads as errand boys. In the country both boys and
girls do a substantial share of farm labor. This is why it is necessary
to coerce poor parents to send their children to school, though in the
relatively small class which keeps plenty of servants it is impossible
to induce parents to keep their children at home instead of paying
schoolmasters to take them off their hands.

It appears then that the bond of affection between parents and children
does not save children from the slavery that denial of rights involves
in adult political relations. It sometimes intensifies it, sometimes
mitigates it; but on the whole children and parents confront one another
as two classes in which all the political power is on one side; and
the results are not at all unlike what they would be if there were no
immediate consanguinity between them, and one were white and the other
black, or one enfranchised and the other disenfranchised, or one ranked
as gentle and the other simple. Not that Nature counts for nothing in
the case and political rights for everything. But a denial of political
rights, and the resultant delivery of one class into the mastery of
another, affects their relations so extensively and profoundly that it
is impossible to ascertain what the real natural relations of the two
classes are until this political relation is abolished.




What is a Child?

An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect:
that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment
if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of
your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman.
If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be
played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to make money
for you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight its way through
in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts will
resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance; but if you
begin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn them for your own
purposes, then there is hardly any limit to the mischief you may do.
Swear at a child, throw your boots at it, send it flying from the room
with a cuff or a kick; and the experience will be as instructive to the
child as a difficulty with a short-tempered dog or a bull. Francis Place
tells us that his father always struck his children when he found one
within his reach. The effect on the young Places seems to have been
simply to make them keep out of their father's way, which was no doubt
what he desired, as far as he desired anything at all. Francis records
the habit without bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his
father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of
it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman's service to his
country as that rare and admirable thing, a Freethinker: the only
sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose
religious convictions, command any respect.

Now Mr Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father; and
I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as compared
with the conventional good father who deliberately imposes himself on
his son as a god; who takes advantage of childish credulity and parent
worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is right and what
he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct on the
child by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and eulogies,
for which he claims divine sanction: compared to this sort of
abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost as a
Providence. Not that it is possible to live with children any more than
with grown-up people without imposing rules of conduct on them. There
is a point at which every person with human nerves has to say to a child
"Stop that noise." But suppose the child asks why! There are various
answers in use. The simplest: "Because it irritates me," may fail; for
it may strike the child as being rather amusing to irritate you; also
the child, having comparatively no nerves, may be unable to conceive
your meaning vividly enough. In any case it may want to make a noise
more than to spare your feelings. You may therefore have to explain
that the effect of the irritation will be that you will do something
unpleasant if the noise continues. The something unpleasant may be only
a look of suffering to rouse the child's affectionate sympathy (if it
has any), or it may run to forcible expulsion from the room with plenty
of unnecessary violence; but the principle is the same: there are no
false pretences involved: the child learns in a straightforward way that
it does not pay to be inconsiderate. Also, perhaps, that Mamma, who made
the child learn the Sermon on the Mount, is not really a Christian.




The Sin of Nadab and Abihu

But there is another sort of answer in wide use which is neither
straightforward, instructive, nor harmless. In its simplest form it
substitutes for "Stop that noise," "Dont be naughty," which means that
the child, instead of annoying you by a perfectly healthy and natural
infantile procedure, is offending God. This is a blasphemous lie; and
the fact that it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does not excuse it
in the least. Dickens tells us of a nurserymaid who elaborated it into
"If you do that, angels wont never love you." I remember a servant who
used to tell me that if I were not good, by which she meant if I did
not behave with a single eye to her personal convenience, the cock would
come down the chimney. Less imaginative but equally dishonest people
told me I should go to hell if I did not make myself agreeable to them.
Bodily violence, provided it be the hasty expression of normal provoked
resentment and not vicious cruelty, cannot harm a child as this sort of
pious fraud harms it. There is a legal limit to physical cruelty; and
there are also human limits to it. There is an active Society which
brings to book a good many parents who starve and torture and overwork
their children, and intimidates a good many more. When parents of this
type are caught, they are treated as criminals; and not infrequently
the police have some trouble to save them from being lynched. The
people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devote
themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is
called bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows
the way a child should go. All the ways discovered so far lead to the
horrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by
Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another
for scraps of food. Pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that precious
and sacred thing the child's conscience into an instrument of our own
convenience, and to use that wonderful and terrible power called Shame
to grind our own axe. It is the sin of stealing fire from the altar: a
sin so impudently practised by popes, parents, and pedagogues, that one
can hardly expect the nurserymaids to see any harm in stealing a few
cinders when they are worrited.

Into the blackest depths of this violation of children's souls one can
hardly bear to look; for here we find pious fraud masking the violation
of the body by obscene cruelty. Any parent or school teacher who takes
a secret and abominable delight in torture is allowed to lay traps into
which every child must fall, and then beat it to his or her heart's
content. A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obvious
conviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded, that the
only thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience and
perfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said, he must insist. As
one of them is not a virtue at all, and the other is the attribute of a
god, one can imagine what the lives of this gentleman's children would
have been if it had been possible for him to live down to his monstrous
and foolish pretensions. And yet he might have written his letter to The
Times (he very nearly did, by the way) without incurring any danger of
being removed to an asylum, or even losing his reputation for taking
a very proper view of his parental duties. And at least it was not a
trivial view, nor an ill meant one. It was much more respectable than
the general consensus of opinion that if a school teacher can devise a
question a child cannot answer, or overhear it calling omega omeega,
he or she may beat the child viciously. Only, the cruelty must be
whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretence of reluctance. It must be
for the child's good. The assailant must say "This hurts me more than
it hurts you." There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The injury to
the child would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly "I beat you
because I like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I can contrive
an excuse for it." But to represent this detestable lust to the child
as Divine wrath, and the cruelty as the beneficent act of God, which is
exactly what all our floggers do, is to add to the torture of the body,
out of which the flogger at least gets some pleasure, the maiming and
blinding of the child's soul, which can bring nothing but horror to
anyone.




The Manufacture of Monsters

This industry is by no means peculiar to China. The Chinese (they say)
make physical monsters. We revile them for it and proceed to make moral
monsters of our own children. The most excusable parents are those who
try to correct their own faults in their offspring. The parent who says
to his child: "I am one of the successes of the Almighty: therefore
imitate me in every particular or I will have the skin off your back"
(a quite common attitude) is a much more absurd figure than the man who,
with a pipe in his mouth, thrashes his boy for smoking. If you must hold
yourself up to your children as an object lesson (which is not at all
necessary), hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example. But
you had much better let the child's character alone. If you once allow
yourself to regard a child as so much material for you to manufacture
into any shape that happens to suit your fancy you are defeating the
experiment of the Life Force. You are assuming that the child does
not know its own business, and that you do. In this you are sure to be
wrong: the child feels the drive of the Life Force (often called the
Will of God); and you cannot feel it for him. Handel's parents no doubt
thought they knew better than their child when they tried to prevent
his becoming a musician. They would have been equally wrong and equally
unsuccessful if they had tried to prevent the child becoming a great
rascal had its genius lain in that direction. Handel would have been
Handel, and Napoleon and Peter of Russia _them_selves in spite of all
the parents in creation, because, as often happens, they were stronger
than their parents. But this does not happen always. Most children
can be, and many are, hopelessly warped and wasted by parents who are
ignorant and silly enough to suppose that they know what a human being
ought to be, and who stick at nothing in their determination to force
their children into their moulds. Every child has a right to its own
bent. It has a right to be a Plymouth Brother though its parents be
convinced atheists. It has a right to dislike its mother or father or
sister or brother or uncle or aunt if they are antipathetic to it. It
has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way
seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right
to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it
were its own father.




Small and Large Families

These rights have now become more important than they used to be,
because the modern practice of limiting families enables them to be
more effectually violated. In a family of ten, eight, six, or even four
children, the rights of the younger ones to a great extent take care of
themselves and of the rights of the elder ones too. Two adult parents,
in spite of a house to keep and an income to earn, can still interfere
to a disastrous extent with the rights and liberties of one child. But
by the time a fourth child has arrived, they are not only outnumbered
two to one, but are getting tired of the thankless and mischievous job
of bringing up their children in the way they think they should go. The
old observation that members of large families get on in the world
holds good because in large families it is impossible for each child to
receive what schoolmasters call "individual attention." The children
may receive a good deal of individual attention from one another in the
shape of outspoken reproach, ruthless ridicule, and violent resistance
to their attempts at aggression; but the parental despots are compelled
by the multitude of their subjects to resort to political rather than
personal rule, and to spread their attempts at moral monster-making over
so many children, that each child has enough freedom, and enough sport
in the prophylactic process of laughing at its elders behind their
backs, to escape with much less damage than the single child. In a large
school the system may be bad; but the personal influence of the head
master has to be exerted, when it is exerted at all, in a public way,
because he has little more power of working on the affections of the
individual scholar in the intimate way that, for example, the mother
of a single child can, than the prime minister has of working on the
affections of any individual voter.




Children as Nuisances

Experienced parents, when children's rights are preached to them, very
naturally ask whether children are to be allowed to do what they like.
The best reply is to ask whether adults are to be allowed to do what
they like. The two cases are the same. The adult who is nasty is not
allowed to do what he likes: neither can the child who likes to be
nasty. There is no difference in principle between the rights of a
child and those of an adult: the difference in their cases is one of
circumstance. An adult is not supposed to be punished except by process
of law; nor, when he is so punished, is the person whom he has injured
allowed to act as judge, jury, and executioner. It is true that
employers do act in this way every day to their workpeople; but this is
not a justified and intended part of the situation: it is an abuse
of Capitalism which nobody defends in principle. As between child and
parent or nurse it is not argued about because it is inevitable. You
cannot hold an impartial judicial inquiry every time a child misbehaves
itself. To allow the child to misbehave without instantly making it
unpleasantly conscious of the fact would be to spoil it. The adult has
therefore to take action of some sort with nothing but his conscience
to shield the child from injustice or unkindness. The action may be a
torrent of scolding culminating in a furious smack causing terror
and pain, or it may be a remonstrance causing remorse, or it may be a
sarcasm causing shame and humiliation, or it may be a sermon causing the
child to believe that it is a little reprobate on the road to hell. The
child has no defence in any case except the kindness and conscience of
the adult; and the adult had better not forget this; for it involves a
heavy responsibility.