In practice what happens is that parents notice that boys brought up at
home become mollycoddles, or prigs, or duffers, unable to take care of
themselves. They see that boys should learn to rough it a little and
to mix with children of their own age. This is natural enough. When you
have preached at and punished a boy until he is a moral cripple, you
are as much hampered by him as by a physical cripple; and as you do not
intend to have him on your hands all your life, and are generally rather
impatient for the day when he will earn his own living and leave you to
attend to yourself, you sooner or later begin to talk to him about the
need for self-reliance, learning to think, and so forth, with the result
that your victim, bewildered by your inconsistency, concludes that there
is no use trying to please you, and falls into an attitude of sulky
resentment. Which is an additional inducement to pack him off to school.
In school, he finds himself in a dual world, under two dispensations.
There is the world of the boys, where the point of honor is to be
untameable, always ready to fight, ruthless in taking the conceit out of
anyone who ventures to give himself airs of superior knowledge or taste,
and generally to take Lucifer for one's model. And there is the world of
the masters, the world of discipline, submission, diligence, obedience,
and continual and shameless assumption of moral and intellectual
authority. Thus the schoolboy hears both sides, and is so far better
off than the homebred boy who hears only one. But the two sides are
not fairly presented. They are presented as good and evil, as vice and
virtue, as villainy and heroism. The boy feels mean and cowardly when
he obeys, and selfish and rascally when he disobeys. He looses his moral
courage just as he comes to hate books and languages. In the end, John
Ruskin, tied so close to his mother's apron-string that he did not
escape even when he went to Oxford, and John Stuart Mill, whose father
ought to have been prosecuted for laying his son's childhood waste with
lessons, were superior, as products of training, to our schoolboys. They
were very conspicuously superior in moral courage; and though they did
not distinguish themselves at cricket and football, they had quite as
much physical hardihood as any civilized man needs. But it is to be
observed that Ruskin's parents were wise people who gave John a full
share in their own life, and put up with his presence both at home and
abroad when they must sometimes have been very weary of him; and Mill,
as it happens, was deliberately educated to challenge all the most
sacred institutions of his country. The households they were brought
up in were no more average households than a Montessori school is an
average school.