Even apart from its insufferable pretensions, the family needs hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable part of it that could not be amputated with advantage.
Do not for a moment suppose that uncultivated people are merely indifferent to high and noble qualities. They hate them malignantly....
Whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years, but of 21 seconds.
You may have as much fun at Shaw’s expense as you want on the grounds that he has never had to train a child and therefore doesn’t know the difficulties. But if you want to laugh last don’t read this preface or the play that follows it, because he will make a laughing-stock or a convert of you as surely as he will prove that he is far cleverer than you can ever hope to be.
Shaw and Ellen Key preach practically the same doctrine about the home; both are temperamentally incapable of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s programme—education outside the home: Shaw because the school is as big a humbug as the family, and Miss Key because “even if institutions can thus rough-plane the material that is to become a member of society, nevertheless they cannot—if they take in the major part of the child’s education—accomplish that which is needed first of all if we are to lift ourselves to a higher spiritual plane in an economically just society: they cannot deepen the emotional life.” Her insistence is strongly upon the education of the feelings as the most important factor in the soul-life. In her vision of the renaissance of motherhood she begins with Nietzsche’s dictum that “a time will come when men will think of nothing except education.” Not that any one can be educated to motherliness; but that our sentimentalization of motherhood as the ever holy, ever infallible power, must be abandoned, and a quality of intelligent mother-power cultivated by definite courses of training which she lays out in detail.
In view of the number of homes I know of that come legitimately under the Shaw denunciation I feel sometimes that any socialization of home life is more hopeful than an attempt to remodel the hopeless conditions inside the home. Regard the parents you know—the great mass of them outside the exceptions that encourage you to believe spasmodically in the beauty and noble need of parenthood. If they are not cruel or stupid or ignorant or smug or righteous or tyrannical or dishonest or unimaginative or weak or quiet ineffectual, they are something else just as bad. It has come to the point where a good parent is as hard to find as an honest man.
Very seriously, however, there is hope in the situation—there is renaissance in the air. And it has its foundation in the sensible and healthy (though so far only tacit) admission that it doesn’t matter so much what your child becomes as that he shall become something! You can’t do much with him, anyhow, and you may as well face it. You can give him, during his first few years, the kind of foundation you think will help him; and for the rest of the time you can do only one thing that he will really need from you: you can develop your own personality as richly as you want him to develop his. You can refuse to worry about him—since that does neither of you any good—and thereby save stores of energy that he may draw upon for your mutual benefit. It becomes a sort of game for two, instead of the uninteresting kind in which one player is given all the advantages. Compared with it the old-fashioned game in which the mother sacrificed everything, suffered everything, wore herself out trying to help her child win, looks not only very unfair and very unnecessary, but very wasteful. And have you ever noticed how the man who sentimentalizes about the wonderful mothers we used to have—his own in particular—is the one whose life is lived at the opposite pole of the mother’s wise direction?
If you disagree with all this, there is still one other method by which you may produce a child who will be a credit to himself and to society. You may be so utterly stupid and wrong-headed that he will rebel to the point of becoming something different. If you prefer this course no one need worry much about your child, because he’ll probably found a system of child education that will cause him to be famous; and if you have a daughter, she’ll probably become a Montessori.
The new home is a recognition that the child is not the only factor in society that needs educating. It assumes that no one’s education is finished just because he’s been made a parent. It means that we can all go on being educated together. It means the elimination of all kinds of domestic follies—for one, the ghastly embarrassment of growing up to discover that you’re different from the rest of your family, and for that reason something of a criminal. It means the kind of understanding that develops a child’s feeling instead of suppressing it, so that he won’t be ashamed, for instance, of having such glorious things as dreams and visions. It means artistic education: and Shaw says that we all grow up stupid or mad to just the extent to which we have not been artistically educated.