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 from
cant, we can achieve freedom. But if we all freed our minds from cant
we should find that for the most part we should have to go on doing
the necessary work of the world exactly as we did it before until we
organized new and free methods of doing it. Many people believed in
secondary co-education (boys and girls taught together) before schools
like Bedales were founded: indeed the practice was common enough in
elementary schools and in Scotland; but their belief did not help them
until Bedales and St George's were organized; and there are still not
nearly enough co-educational schools in existence to accommodate all
the children of the parents who believe in co-education up to university
age, even if they could always afford the fees of these exceptional
schools. It may be edifying to tell a duke that our public schools are
all wrong in their constitution and methods, or a costermonger that
children should be treated as in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister instead of as
they are treated at the elementary school at the corner of his street;
but what are the duke and the coster to do? Neither of them has any
effective choice in the matter: their children must either go to the
schools that are, or to no school at all. And as the duke thinks with
reason that his son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does
not go to school, and the coster knows that his son will become an
illiterate hooligan if he is left to the streets, there is no real
alternative for either of them. Child life must be socially organized:
no parent, rich or poor, can choose institutions that do not exist; and
the private enterprise of individual school masters appealing to a
group of well-to-do parents, though it may shew what can be done by
enthusiasts with new methods, cannot touch the mass of our children.
For the average parent or child nothing is really available except the
established practice; and this is what makes it so important that the
established practice should be a sound one, and so useless for clever
individuals to disparage it unless they can organize an alternative
practice and make it, too, general.