In a word, we have no right to insist on educating a child; for its
education can end only with its life and will not even then be complete.
Compulsory completion of education is the last folly of a rotten
and desperate civilization. It is the rattle in its throat before
dissolution. All we can fairly do is to prescribe certain definite
acquirements and accomplishments as qualifications for certain
employments; and to secure them, not by the ridiculous method of
inflicting injuries on the persons who have not yet mastered them, but
by attaching certain privileges (not pecuniary) to the employments.
Most acquirements carry their own privileges with them. Thus a baby has
to be pretty closely guarded and imprisoned because it cannot take
care of itself. It has even to be carried about (the most complete
conceivable infringement of its liberty) until it can walk. But nobody
goes on carrying children after they can walk lest they should walk into
mischief, though Arab boys make their sisters carry them, as our own
spoiled children sometimes make their nurses, out of mere laziness,
because sisters in the East and nurses in the West are kept in
servitude. But in a society of equals (the only reasonable and
permanently possible sort of society) children are in much greater
danger of acquiring bandy legs through being left to walk before they
are strong enough than of being carried when they are well able to walk.
Anyhow, freedom of movement in a nursery is the reward of learning to
walk; and in precisely the same way freedom of movement in a city is
the reward of learning how to read public notices, and to count and use
money. The consequences are of course much larger than the mere ability
to read the name of a street or the number of a railway platform and the
destination of a train. When you enable a child to read these, you also
enable it to read this preface, to the utter destruction, you may quite
possibly think, of its morals and docility. You also expose it to the
danger of being run over by taxicabs and trains. The moral and physical
risks of education are enormous: every new power a child acquires,
from speaking, walking, and co-ordinating its vision, to conquering
continents and founding religions, opens up immense new possibilities of
mischief. Teach a child to write and you teach it how to forge: teach it
to speak and you teach it how to lie: teach it to walk and you teach it
how to kick its mother to death.
The great problem of slavery for those whose aim is to maintain it
is the problem of reconciling the efficiency of the slave with
the helplessness that keeps him in servitude; and this problem is
fortunately not completely soluble; for it is not in fact found possible
for a duke to treat his solicitor or his doctor as he treats his
laborers, though they are all equally his slaves: the laborer being in
fact less dependent on his favor than the professional man. Hence it is
that men come to resent, of all things, protection, because it so often
means restriction of their liberty lest they should make a bad use
of it. If there are dangerous precipices about, it is much easier
and cheaper to forbid people to walk near the edge than to put up an
effective fence: that is why both legislators and parents and the paid
deputies of parents are always inhibiting and prohibiting and punishing
and scolding and laming and cramping and delaying progress and growth
instead of making the dangerous places as safe as possible and then
boldly taking and allowing others to take the irreducible minimum of
risk.