If you cross-examine the duke and the coster, you will find that they
are not concerned for the scholastic attainments of their children.
Ask the duke whether he could pass the standard examination of
twelve-year-old children in elementary schools, and he will admit,
with an entirely placid smile, that he would almost certainly be
ignominiously plucked. And he is so little ashamed of or disadvantaged
by his condition that he is not prepared to spend an hour in remedying
it. The coster may resent the inquiry instead of being amused by it;
but his answer, if true, will be the same. What they both want for their
children is the communal training, the apprenticeship to society, the
lessons in holding one's own among people of all sorts with whom one is
not, as in the home, on privileged terms. These can be acquired only by
"mixing with the world," no matter how wicked the world is. No parent
cares twopence whether his children can write Latin hexameters or
repeat the dates of the accession of all the English monarchs since the
Conqueror; but all parents are earnestly anxious about the manners of
their children. Better Claude Duval than Kaspar Hauser. Laborers who are
contemptuously anti-clerical in their opinions will send their
daughters to the convent school because the nuns teach them some sort
of gentleness of speech and behavior. And peers who tell you that our
public schools are rotten through and through, and that our Universities
ought to be razed to the foundations, send their sons to Eton and
Oxford, Harrow and Cambridge, not only because there is nothing else to
be done, but because these places, though they turn out blackguards
and ignoramuses and boobies galore, turn them out with the habits and
manners of the society they belong to. Bad as those manners are in many
respects, they are better than no manners at all. And no individual or
family can possibly teach them. They can be acquired only by living in
an organized community in which they are traditional.
Thus we see that there are reasons for the segregation of children even
in families where the great reason: namely, that children are nuisances
to adults, does not press very hardly, as, for instance, in the houses
of the very poor, who can send their children to play in the streets,
or the houses of the very rich, which are so large that the children's
quarters can be kept out of the parents' way like the servants'
quarters.