to the appalling effects on our national manners
and character of the organization of the home and the school as petty
tyrannies, and the absence of all teaching of self-respect and training
in self-assertion. Bullied and ordered about, the Englishman obeys like
a sheep, evades like a knave, or tries to murder his oppressor. Merely
criticized or opposed in committee, or invited to consider anybody's
views but his own, he feels personally insulted and wants to resign
or leave the room unless he is apologized to. And his panic and
bewilderment when he sees that the older hands at the work have no
patience with him and do not intend to treat him as infallible, are
pitiable as far as they are anything but ludicrous. That is what comes
of not being taught to consider other people's wills, and left to submit
to them or to over-ride them as if they were the winds and the weather.
Such a state of mind is incompatible not only with the democratic
introduction of high civilization, but with the comprehension and
maintenance of such civilized institutions as have been introduced by
benevolent and intelligent despots and aristocrats.

We Must Reform Society before we can Reform Ourselves

When we come to the positive problem of what to do with children if we
are to give up the established plan, we find the difficulties so great
that we begin to understand why so many people who detest the system and
look back with loathing on their own schooldays, must helplessly send
their children to the very schools they themselves were sent to, because
there is no alternative except abandoning the children to undisciplined
vagabondism. Man in society must do as everybody else does in his class:
only fools and romantic novices imagine that freedom is a mere matter of
the readiness of the individual to snap his fingers at convention. It
is true that most of us live in a condition of quite unnecessary
inhibition, wearing ugly and uncomfortable clothes, making ourselves and
other people miserable by the heathen horrors of mourning, staying away
from the theatre because we cannot afford the stalls and are ashamed
to go to the pit, and in dozens of other ways enslaving ourselves
when there are comfortable alternatives open to us without any real
drawbacks. The contemplation of these petty slaveries, and of the
triumphant ease with which sensible people throw them off, creates an
impression that if we only take Johnson's advice to free our minds