Modern education is founded on the
principle that a parent is more likely to be cruel than anybody else. It passes
over the obvious fact that he is less likely to be cruel than anybody else.
Anybody may happen to be cruel; but the first chances of cruelty come with the
whole colourless and indifferent crowd of total strangers and mechanical
mercenaries, whom it is now the custom to call in as infallible agents of
improvement; policemen, doctors, detectives, inspectors, instructors, and so
on. They are automatically given arbitrary power because there are here and
there such things as criminal parents; as if there were no such things as
criminal doctors or criminal school-masters.
A mother is not always judicious
about her child's diet, so it is given into the control of Dr. Crippen. A
father is thought not to teach his sons the purest morality; so they are put
under the tutorship of Eugene Aram. These celebrated criminals are no more rare
in their respective professions than the cruel parents are in the profession of
parenthood. But indeed the case is far stronger than this; and there is no need
to rely on the case of such criminals at all.
The ordinary weaknesses of human
nature will explain all the weaknesses of bureaucracy and business government
all over the world. The official need only be an ordinary man to be more
indifferent to other people's children than to his own; and even to sacrifice
other people's family prosperity to his own. He may be bored; he may be bribed;
he may be brutal, for any one of the thousand reasons that ever made a man a
brute.
All this elementary common sense is
entirely left out of account in our educational and social systems of today. It
is assumed that the hireling will not flee, and that solely because he is a
hireling. It is denied that the shepherd will lay down his life for the sheep;
or for that matter, even that the she-wolf will fight for the cubs. We are to
believe that mothers are inhuman; but not that officials are human. There are
unnatural parents, but there are no natural passions; at least, there are none
where the fury of King Lear dared to find them-- in the beadle. Such is the
latest light on the education of the young; and the same principle that is
applied to the child is applied to the husband and wife. Just as it assumes
that a child will certainly be loved by anybody except his mother, so it
assumes that a man can be happy with anybody except the one woman he has
himself chosen for his wife.
