I hate prizes. To-day, Violet Brown and Margaret Steel, usually the best of friends, are looking daggers at each other. To-morrow I shall read them the story of the Judgment of Paris. And what rubbish these books are! There isn't a decent piece of literature in the bunch—Matty's Present, The Girl Who Came to School. Jerusalem!
V.
The more I see of it the more I admire the co-education system. To me it is delightful to see boys and girls playing together. Segregate boys and you destroy their perspective. I used to find at the university that it was generally the English Public School Boy who set up one standard of morals for his sisters and another for the shop-girls.
Co-education is the greatest thing in our State educational system. The bairns early learn the interdependence of the sexes; boys and girls early begin to understand each other. All danger of putting women on a pedestal is taken away; the boys find that the girls are ordinary humans with many failings ("Aw'll tell the mester!"), and many virtues. The girls find that boys ... well, I don't exactly know what the girls find.
Seldom is there any over-familiarity. The girls have a natural protective aloofness that awes the boys; the boys generally have strenuous interests that lead them to ignore the girls for long periods. At present the sexes are very friendly, for love-making (always a holy thing with bairns), has come with spring; but in a few weeks the boys will be playing football or "bools," and they will not be seen in the girls' playground.
I can detect no striving after what is called chivalry (thank heaven!) If Maggie and Willie both lay hands on a ruler, they fight it out, but Maggie generally gets it; she can say more. Mr. Henpeck begins life as a chick. I hate the popular idea of chivalry, and I want my boys to hate it. Chivalry to me means rising in the Tube to offer a typist your seat, and then going off to the city to boss a score of waitresses who are paid 6s. a week. As a nation we have no chivalry; we have only etiquette. We hold doors open for nice women, and we tamely suffer or forget about a society that condemns poor women to slave for sixteen hours a day sewing shirts at a penny an hour. We say "Thank you" when the lady of the house stops playing, and we banish the prostitutes of Piccadilly from our minds. Chivalry has been dead for a long time now.
I want to substitute kindness for the word chivalry. I want to tell my bairns that the only sin in the world is cruelty. I do not preach morality for I hardly know what morality is. I have no morals, I am an a-moralist, or should it be a non-moralist? I judge not, and I mean to school my bairns into judging not. Yet I am not being quite consistent. I do judge cruelty and uncharitableness; but I judge not those who do not act up to the accustomed code of morals. A code is always a temptation to a healthy person; it is like a window by a railway siding: it cries out: "Chuck a chunk of coal through me." Codes never make people moral; they merely make them hypocritical. I include the Scotch code.