Such a protest as
this, however, will be little heeded. There is no political party which
cares about education or even wants to know in what it consists. The
most persistent and clever and resourceful of those parties--of which, I
fear, the Fabian Society is far too good to be representative--only half
believes in the family, and is daily, and ever with more lamentable
success, seeking to substitute for the home some collective device or
other precisely as rational as that scheme of Plato's whereby the babies
were to be shuffled so that no mother should recognize her own baby,
while the fathers, need it be said, were to be as gloriously
irresponsible as under the schemes for the endowment of motherhood.
"Socialism intervenes between the children and the parents.... Socialism
in fact is the State family. The old family of the private individual
must vanish before it, just as the old waterworks of private enterprise,
or the old gas company. They are incompatible with it." Thus Mr. H. G.
Wells.
Whilst this sort of thing passes for thinking, it is a task that has
little promise in it to demand a return to the study of human nature,
and insist that only by obeying it can we command it, as Bacon said of
Nature at large. Meanwhile the madness proceeds apace; nursery-schools,
wretched parody of the nursery, are advocated at length in even Fabian
tracts, and the writer who suggests that an elder sister may be
receiving the highest kind of education in staying at home and helping
her mother, would sound almost to himself like an echo from the dead
past did he not know that neither a Plato nor a million tons of moderns
can walk through human nature or any other fact as if it were not
there.
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