Parents and Schoolmasters.
Brief Duration of Paternal Influence.
In England the home influences are much undervalued. Wealthy English parents soon despair of doing anything themselves for the moral training of their children, so they “pack them off” to some distant school to be placed under the influence of masters whom they have never seen and of whom nothing is really known except that they are in holy orders. If an Englishman has been educated at home, or even near home, he is generally rather ashamed of it, and unless he is exceptionally forcible in after life he is likely to be despised for it. Still, the boy must be born in very unfortunate circumstances whose father and mother could not, if they chose, do more for his moral training than a schoolmaster who has perhaps fifty to attend to without the parental interest in any of them. The worst of the distant-school system is that it deprives the home residence that remains of all beneficial discipline, for the boys are guests during the holidays, and the great business is to amuse them. Then they go away to follow some profession, and the father, as he thinks over his fond dreams of companionship and paternal influence, may reckon (if the now useless calculation can still interest him) for how many months or weeks that influence has been directly operative in the whole course of his children’s lives.
English Grammar Schools.
Benefits of Rural Life for Boys.
For this reason the English grammar schools, though despised because they are cheap and easily accessible to the middle classes, may have a better effect on the family life of the country than the fashionable public schools. The idea would be to get both good home education and good school education at the same time, especially when the parents have the luck to live in the country. Rural life is good for boys, both physically and mentally; it gives them a healthy interest in a thousand things, especially in a rudimentary kind of natural history, and it prevents them from acquiring the premature cynicism and sharpness that are amongst the most undesirable characteristics of young Parisians.
The Root of the Difficulty.
The Natural World.
The Argument from Social Interests.
The root of the moral difficulty is that the natural world is non-moral, and the natural world is all we have to appeal to when the various forms of the supernatural have all equally been rejected. After that we may argue that morality, in the most comprehensive sense, is the only sound basis for human societies, and that all social interests are on the side of it. That, no doubt, is true, and it is a good subject for sound reasoning, but reason is not authority, it is only an attempt to persuade, and the boyish nature detests moral lecturing.