A boy of six whom once I knew, when his mother prepared to teach him to read, countered her with the grave announcement that, in his opinion, “mothers were not meant to teach.” It is a more reasonable view than appears at first sight, at all events for English children. To them the combination of intense love and a desire to teach is too overwhelming: they prefer a more dispassionate interest in a matter which seems to them one in which all emotion may conveniently be avoided. It is too much at an immature age to be called on to respond to an intellectual and an emotional stimulus combined, and it is unfair from a child’s point of view to be made to feel that laziness or inaccuracy, periodical faults in all of us, are not only faults but failures in devotion towards those for whom devotion is a natural habit. Most English parents, though after some ineffectual struggles against this natural reluctance, acquiesce in the truth of it. The time of the Goodchilds has gone by, and education has been much improved. The acquiescence—to tell the truth—is apt to go too far, and the process of education is left to machines called teachers without any interest at all on the part of the parents. The English mother, I think, is little preoccupied about education. To her it is only one of the many processes of equipment necessary for a child in its passage to an age of discretion—a more elaborate process for boys than for girls, but likely to bring more tangible results. About material and physical well-being she will occupy herself endlessly, to the dismay of masters and matrons, but she will pay comparatively small attention to the development of an intellect, unless her own is exceptionally well developed, in comparison to the development of muscle and character. If her children respond feebly to the teaching they are given, she will resign herself, not without a secret sympathy for them, to having stupid children, but without inquiring whether possibly there is some psychological trouble at the bottom of this failure, which a new adjustment and fresh guidance might overcome: if, on the other hand, the response is conspicuously successful, she rather wistfully regards the soaring of their young intellects beyond her ken, wondering “how she came to have such clever children.”
Cleverness is a horrible word, much overworked in England: it may mean nothing but an aptitude for passing examinations with credit. She is certainly right to regard this aptitude as unimportant, but she is wrong where so often she remains indifferent while a really promising mind is slowly ruined by unsuitable teaching or unsuitable food. Few English mothers—I suspect the French of surpassing them here—manage to keep their children’s confidence in this matter. The play-hours and the friendships of school are inexhaustible subjects of conversation, but lessons quickly come under the head of things not talked about, except in a jocular way or in passing, rather embarrassed, reference. Even the best of mothers is at a disadvantage here, at least where a son is concerned, a fact cleverly illustrated in Mr Arnold Lunn’s novel “Loose Ends.” New interests, new views expressed by new human beings seize hold of him with violence, bursting in on the old close community of two, and leaving the more stable of the couple out in the cold, irritatingly faced with inability to “keep up,” though conscious all the while of no difficulty in keeping up anywhere else in the wide world. Here again, it is often her very passion which throws her out of the race with less devoted rivals: boys and girls can be intellectually as well as morally tiresome, and they feel the need for being able to indulge their tiresomeness without giving pain. As one of my friends put it: “I never talk about these things at home, it always leads to ‘Grief’.” Good schoolmasters and all schoolboys know that “grief” is fatal in the realm of ideas. Few parents can repress ‘grief’ with success, and they must pay the penalty for their over-lively concern. Their only remedy, unless they are content to relapse in their children’s eyes into dear old back numbers, is to wait till the ferment has settled down: “grief” will then neither be so frequent nor so difficult to overcome.
It is the mother more than the father who makes, and who is, the home. Her influence upon her children is incalculable, but surely it is going a little too far, especially in the case of boys, to say that during the time of their education they should not leave home or lose the influence of home. During the controversy over Mr Alec Waugh’s “Loom of Youth,” Sir Sydney Olivier wrote to the Nation a letter in which were these words:
“No parent should be allowed to send his boy to school in a boarding house without special excuse any more than to send him to a private lunatic asylum.”
This very dogmatic assertion leaves out of account one of what seem to be the undisputed advantages of public school education, the advantage of living in an orderly and disciplined community for a greater part of the years of later boyhood. There will always be exceptional boys to whom this life is not appropriate, but for the majority of boys it is both beneficial and enjoyable. It might even be said that the majority of boys demand it. Even the holders of opposite views agree that it is an infinitely better system for boys from inadequate homes than the day school. In my opinion, the definition of an inadequate home would be a very wide one, and likely to remain so in spite of all possible advances in the way of greater social equality and uniformity. The Montessori system is based on the belief that the home, which is organised for the convenience of its adult inhabitants, cannot give the requisite attention and liberty to children, who are slow in action, capricious and inexperienced: home life to young children, in this view, is both too protective and too restrictive. For different reasons there is a case to be made out for holding that, as a rule, the home is not properly organised for the advantage, out of school hours, of growing boys between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. All parents are naturally anxious to prepare their children for life in the world, to enlighten them in their difficulties and aid the opening of their minds, but it remains sadly true that most of them find their incapability of fulfilling this natural function only too soon. As a well known man of letters said to me recently: “Yes, the boys have got to go to school. My wife and I started with all sorts of jolly ideas about keeping them at home and educating them ourselves. But we found it was no good. They said they wanted to go to school, and so they must.”
As I said above, there is something antipathetic to the young in learning from those whom they love: they would rather be controlled and taught by those for whom they have no primary affection. Besides, it must be confessed that parents have other shortcomings, all the shortcomings of varied human nature, which are perfectly patent to the uncanny acuteness of children. The father and mother whose influence during the critical years of childhood and adolescence would be nothing but good are extremely rare. Parents, for one thing, can so seldom hit the mean between taking too much interest and too little. Indifference means either undue indulgence or undue restriction; too great interest leads either to jealousy of other influences, to hampering independence, to surrounding a boy with a close atmosphere of emotion from which he would give anything to get away. Boys like to be treated calmly, to be rewarded calmly and to be punished calmly: they are unemotional creatures whom school suits well in this respect. The continued society of ideal parents may be ideal for a boy, but where parents fall short of the ideal, it is questionable whether their continued society is a good thing: and they may be sure that their lapses will be judged by their children with all the cruelty of innocence and ignorance.
Holidays, to which the boys come back full of affection and pleasant anticipation, are quite long enough to give the good mother and father all the chance they need if they will only take it, to say nothing of the influence of letters. How different is the eagerness with which at a boarding school a boy looks for the letters bearing the well known handwriting of his mother to the apathy with which any home bred boy must regard the daily prospect of banalities over the family tea-table! As a matter of fact, the opportunities of the holidays are too often neglected. It is then that enthusiasm may be reinforced and new interests aroused to counteract the routine and convention which is the chief fault of our schools to-day. Too many parents think their duties are limited then to giving their children enjoyment, forgetting that theirs is the responsibility for sending their boys back to school not one whit more developed or improved than when they left its gates some weeks earlier. This very failure shows the difficulty of home education: the boarding school is organised purely for the advantage of the boys, while in the home the convenience of the parents must be competitive, even where it is not paramount. The interests of young and old cannot possibly entirely coincide, and it would be foolish for parents who, after all, have their own lives to lead and their own developments to be pursued, to sacrifice their time and their arrangements altogether for the sake of their children. To what lengths an English mother will go in this direction many a son will confess, remembering his own insensibility at the moment: but it would be bad that she should be tempted to go too far or be forced, on the other hand, into a habit of indifference through having continually to restrain her natural impulse of devotion in the general interests of the whole household.
Another argument for entirely home education is the moral one. It is one of the most powerful in its appeal to mothers, to whom the idea of adolescent impurity is revolting. Personally, I cannot see any reason for supposing that the temptations of an adolescent male, which are absolutely inevitable, will be any less violent at home than at school. The mother of a French boy certainly does not believe that they are, and does not act on that assumption. So far as strength to resist temptations goes, the influence of judicious parents on boys at school is, as I know perfectly well, quite as strong and quite as successful as it could have been if the boys had never left their sight. Besides, there are few mothers who can resist a kind of morbid spying on their children as they first come into contact with physical experience of their sex. Nothing could possibly be more irritating for a boy, and it may lead him into foolishness out of more defiance and desperation. It is a thorny time for both parties to the relationship, and happy are those mothers and sons who come out of it with mutual love and respect undiminished. Sir Sydney Olivier, to judge from another passage in the letter already referred to, would like the morals of boys to be saved and their sentimental education completed by love affairs with mature females. Such affairs are, no doubt, extremely valuable in certain cases. As Rousseau said in his Confessions: “Il est certain que les entretiens intéressants et sensés d’une femme de mérite sont plus propres à former un jeune homme que toute la pédantesque philosophie des livres.” But he also allowed still closer relations with Madame de Warens to be included in his own scheme of development. It is to be doubted if England is suited to this form of education. Certainly few English mothers would regard without intense suspicion the ideal and elderly Egeria, who is to absorb usefully and harmlessly all the superfluous sentimental energy of their beloved son. Their hearts are so terribly vulnerable in this respect, poor things, for they hate physical truths and love sentimental pruderies. Only the best of them really look things in the face and say to their boys: “Look here, I know how things are. You are growing up and I sympathise deeply with all your feelings and temptations. I have always tried to teach you that the greatest things, and the only things truly valuable, are love and beauty and truth. I think you have learnt what I meant to teach you, and now you will have to begin to put it to the test. I shall trust you to do nothing unworthy. I shall not ask you questions or spy upon you. But, whatever you do, remember there is nobody in the world more ready to hear your troubles or to help you than your mother. That is what mothers are for, even if they suffer in the process. I know you will not make me suffer willingly: but I would rather suffer anything than feel that you were ashamed to turn to me for help and sympathy in any difficulty.” Such confidence breeds strength, the strength in which every good English home should abound. And it must come from that centre of the home—the mother.