友情提示:如果本网页打开太慢或显示不完整,请尝试鼠标右键“刷新”本网页!
a treatise on parents and children(父母与子女专题研究)-第14部分
快捷操作: 按键盘上方向键 ← 或 → 可快速上下翻页 按键盘上的 Enter 键可回到本书目录页 按键盘上方向键 ↑ 可回到本页顶部! 如果本书没有阅读完,想下次继续接着阅读,可使用上方 "收藏到我的浏览器" 功能 和 "加入书签" 功能!
continual outcry against the sacrifice of mental accomplishments to
athletics。 In other words a sacrifice of the professed object of
compulsory education to the real object of voluntary education。 It is
assumed that this means that people prefer bodily to mental culture; but
may it not mean that they prefer liberty and satisfaction to coercion and
privation。 Why is it that people who have been taught Shakespear as a
school subject loathe his plays and cannot by any means be persuaded ever
to open his works after they escape from school; whereas there is still; 300
years after his death; a wide and steady sale for his works to people who
read his plays as plays; and not as task work? If Shakespear; or for that
matter; Newton and Leibnitz; are allowed to find their readers and students
they will find them。 If their works are annotated and paraphrased by
dullards; and the annotations and paraphrases forced on all young people
by imprisonment and flogging and scolding; there will not be a single man
of letters or higher mathematician the more in the country: on the
contrary there will be less; as so many potential lovers of literature and
mathematics will have been incurably prejudiced against them。
Everyone who is conversant with the class in which child imprisonment
and compulsory schooling is carried out to the final extremity of the
university degree knows that its scholastic culture is a sham; that it knows
little about literature or art and a great deal about point…to…point races; and
that the village cobbler; who has never read a page of Plato; and is
admittedly a dangerously ignorant man politically; is nevertheless a
Socrates compared to the classically educated gentlemen who discuss
58
… Page 59…
A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN
politics in country houses at election time (and at no other time) after their
day's earnest and skilful shooting。 Think of the years and years of weary
torment the women of the piano…possessing class have been forced to
spend over the keyboard; fingering scales。 How many of them could be
bribed to attend a pianoforte recital by a great player; though they will rise
from sick beds rather than miss Ascot or Goodwood?
Another familiar fact that teaches the same lesson is that many women
who have voluntarily attained a high degree of culture cannot add up their
own housekeeping books; though their education in simple arithmetic was
compulsory; whereas their higher education has been wholly voluntary。
Everywhere we find the same result。 The imprisonment; the beating; the
taming and laming; the breaking of young spirits; the arrest of
development; the atrophy of all inhibitive power except the power of fear;
are real: the education is sham。 Those who have been taught most
know least。
59
… Page 60…
A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN
Antichrist
Among the worst effects of the unnatural segregation of children in
schools and the equally unnatural constant association of them with adults
in the family is the utter defeat of the vital element in Christianity。 Christ
stands in the world for that intuition of the highest humanity that we; being
members one of another; must not complain; must not scold; must not
strike; nor revile nor persecute nor revenge nor punish。 Now family life
and school life are; as far as the moral training of children is concerned;
nothing but the deliberate inculcation of a routine of complaint; scolding;
punishment; persecution; and revenge as the natural and only possible way
of dealing with evil or inconvenience。 〃Aint nobody to be whopped for
this here?〃 exclaimed Sam Weller when he saw his employer's name
written up on a stage coach; and conceived the phenomenon as an insult
which reflected on himself。 This exclamation of Sam Weller is at once
the negation of Christianity and the beginning and the end of current
morality; and so it will remain as long as the family and the school persist
as we know them: that is; as long as the rights of children are so utterly
denied that nobody will even take the trouble to ascertain what they are;
and coming of age is like the turning of a convict into the street after
twenty…one years penal servitude。 Indeed it is worse; for the convict may
have learnt before his conviction how to live in freedom and may
remember how to set about it; however lamed his powers of freedom may
have become through disuse; but the child knows no other way of life but
the slave's way。 Born free; as Rousseau says; he has been laid hands on by
slaves from the moment of his birth and brought up as a slave。 How is he;
when he is at last set free; to be anything else than the slave he actually is;
clamoring for war; for the lash; for police; prisons; and scaffolds in a wild
panic of delusion that without these things he is lost。 The grown…up
Englishman is to the end of his days a badly brought…up child; beyond
belief quarrelsome; petulant; selfish; destructive; and cowardly: afraid
that the Germans will come and enslave him; that the burglar will come
and rob him; that the bicycle or motor car will run over him; that the
smallpox will attack him; and that the devil will run away with him and
60
… Page 61…
A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN
empty him out like a sack of coals on a blazing fire unless his nurse or his
parents or his schoolmaster or his bishop or his judge or his army or his
navy will do something to frighten these bad things away。 And this
Englishman; without the moral courage of a louse; will risk his neck for
fun fifty times every winter in the hunting field; and at Badajos sieges and
the like will ram his head into a hole bristling with sword blades rather
than be beaten in the one department in which he has been brought up to
consult his own honor。 As a Sportsman (and war is fundamentally the
sport of hunting and fighting the most dangerous of the beasts of prey) he
feels free。 He will tell you himself that the true sportsman is never a
snob; a coward; a duffer; a cheat; a thief; or a liar。 Curious; is it not; that he
has not the same confidence in other sorts of man?
And even sport is losing its freedom。 Soon everybody will be
schooled; mentally and physically; from the cradle to the end of the term
of adult compulsory military service; and finally of compulsory civil
service lasting until the age of superannuation。 Always more schooling;
more compulsion。 We are to be cured by an excess of the dose that has
poisoned us。 Satan is to cast out Satan。
61
… Page 62…
A TREATISE ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN
Under the Whip
Clearly this will not do。 We must reconcile education with liberty。
We must find out some means of making men workers and; if need be;
warriors; without making them slaves。 We must cultivate the noble
virtues that have their root in pride。 Now no schoolmaster will teach
these any more than a prison governor will teach his prisoners how to
mutiny and escape。 Self…preservation forces him to break the spirit that
revolts against him; and to inculcate submission; even to obscene assault;
as a duty。 A bishop once had the hardihood to say that he would rather
see England free than England sober。 Nobody has yet dared to say that
he would rather see an England of ignoramuses than an England of
cowards and slaves。 And if anyone did; it would be necessary to point
out that the antithesis is not a practical one; as we have got at present an
England of ignoramuses who are also cowards and slaves; and extremely
proud of it at that; because in school they are taught to submit; with what
they ridiculously call Oriental fatalism (as if any Oriental has ever
submitted more helplessly and sheepishly to robbery and oppression than
we Occidentals do); to be driven day after day into compounds and set to
the tasks they loathe by the men they hate and fear; as if this were the
inevitable destiny of mankind。 And naturally; when they grow up; they
helplessly exchange the prison of the school for the prison of the mine or
the workshop or the office; and drudge along stupidly and miserably; with
just enough gregarious instinct to turn furiously on any intelligent person
who proposes a change。 It would be quite easy to make England a
paradise; according to our present ideas; in a few years。 There is no
myste
快捷操作: 按键盘上方向键 ← 或 → 可快速上下翻页 按键盘上的 Enter 键可回到本书目录页 按键盘上方向键 ↑ 可回到本页顶部!
温馨提示: 温看小说的同时发表评论,说出自己的看法和其它小伙伴们分享也不错哦!发表书评还可以获得积分和经验奖励,认真写原创书评 被采纳为精评可以获得大量金币、积分和经验奖励哦!