this, let us consider the main danger of childish docility and parental
officiousness.




The Abuse of Docility

Docility may survive as a lazy habit long after it has ceased to be a
beneficial instinct. If you catch a child when it is young enough to be
instinctively docile, and keep it in a condition of unremitted tutelage
under the nurserymaid, the governess, the preparatory school, the
secondary school, and the university, until it is an adult, you will
produce, not a self-reliant, free, fully matured human being, but a
grown-up schoolboy or schoolgirl, capable of nothing in the way of
original or independent action except outbursts of naughtiness in the
women and blackguardism in the men. That is exactly what we get at
present in our rich and consequently governing classes: they pass from
juvenility to senility without ever touching maturity except in body.
The classes which cannot afford this sustained tutelage are notably more
self-reliant and grown-up: an office boy of fifteen is often more of a
man than a university student of twenty. Unfortunately this precocity
is disabled by poverty, ignorance, narrowness, and a hideous power of
living without art or love or beauty and being rather proud of it. The
poor never escape from servitude: their docility is preserved by their
slavery. And so all become the prey of the greedy, the selfish, the
domineering, the unscrupulous, the predatory. If here and there an
individual refuses to be docile, ten docile persons will beat him or
lock him up or shoot him or hang him at the bidding of his oppressors
and their own. The crux of the whole difficulty about parents,