These picturesque martial incidents are being reproduced every day in
our ordinary life. We are bluffed by hardy simpletons and headstrong
bounders as the Russians were bluffed by Ney; and our Wellingtons
are threadbound by slave-democracy as Gulliver was threadbound by the
Lilliputians. We are a mass of people living in a submissive routine to
which we have been drilled from our childhood. When you ask us to take
the simplest step outside that routine, we say shyly, "Oh, I really
couldnt," or "Oh, I shouldnt like to," without being able to point out
the smallest harm that could possibly ensue: victims, not of a rational
fear of real dangers, but of pure abstract fear, the quintessence of
cowardice, the very negation of "the fear of God." Dotted about among
us are a few spirits relatively free from this inculcated paralysis,
sometimes because they are half-witted, sometimes because they are
unscrupulously selfish, sometimes because they are realists as to money
and unimaginative as to other things, sometimes even because they are
exceptionally able, but always because they are not afraid of shadows
nor oppressed with nightmares. And we see these few rising as if by
magic into power and affluence, and forming, with the millionaires who
have accidentally gained huge riches by the occasional windfalls of our
commerce, the governing class. Now nothing is more disastrous than
a governing class that does not know how to govern. And how can this
rabble of the casual products of luck, cunning, and folly, be expected
to know how to govern? The merely lucky ones and the hereditary ones do
not owe their position to their qualifications at all. As to the rest,
the realism which seems their essential qualification often consists not
only in a lack of romantic imagination, which lack is a merit, but
of the realistic, constructive, Utopian imagination, which lack is
a ghastly defect. Freedom from imaginative illusion is therefore no
guarantee whatever of nobility of character: that is why inculcated
submissiveness makes us slaves to people much worse than ourselves,
and why it is so important that submissiveness should no longer be
inculcated.
And yet as long as you have the compulsory school as we know it, we
shall have submissiveness inculcated. What is more, until the active
hours of child life are organized separately from the active hours of
adult life, so that adults can enjoy the society of children in reason
without being tormented, disturbed, harried, burdened, and hindered
in their work by them as they would be now if there were no compulsory
schools and no children hypnotized into the belief that they must tamely
go to them and be imprisoned and beaten and over-tasked in them, we
shall have schools under one pretext or another; and we shall have all
the evil consequences and all the social hopelessness that result from
turning a nation of potential freemen and freewomen into a nation of
two-legged spoilt spaniels with everything crushed out of their nature
except dread of the whip. Liberty is the breath of life to nations; and
liberty is the one thing that parents, schoolmasters, and rulers spend
their lives in extirpating for the sake of an immediately quiet and
finally disastrous life.
Notes on this etext:
This text was taken from a printed volume containing the
plays "Misalliance", "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets",
"Fanny's First Play", and the essay "A Treatise on Parents
and Children".
Notes on the editing: Italicized text is delimited with
underlines ("_"). Punctuation and spelling retained as in
the printed text. Shaw intentionally spelled many words
according to a non-standard system. For example, "don't" is
given as "dont" (without apostrophe), "Dr." is given as "Dr"
(without a period at the end), and "Shakespeare" is given as
"Shakespear" (no "e" at the end). The pound (currency)
symbol has been replaced by the word "pounds".