llowed to do. I have no
recollection of being taught to read or write; so I presume I was born
with both faculties; but many people seem to have bitter recollections
of being forced reluctantly to acquire them. And though I have the
uttermost contempt for a teacher so ill mannered and incompetent as to
be unable to make a child learn to read and write without also making it
cry, still I am prepared to admit that I had rather have been compelled
to learn to read and write with tears by an incompetent and ill mannered
person than left in ignorance. Reading, writing, and enough arithmetic
to use money honestly and accurately, together with the rudiments of law
and order, become necessary conditions of a child's liberty before it
can appreciate the importance of its liberty, or foresee that these
accomplishments are worth acquiring. Nature has provided for this by
evolving the instinct of docility. Children are very docile: they have
a sound intuition that they must do what they are told or perish. And
adults have an intuition, equally sound, that they must take advantage
of this docility to teach children how to live properly or the children
will not survive. The difficulty is to know where to stop. To illustrate
this, let us consider the main danger of childish docility and parental
officiousness.

The Abuse of Docility

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. Th