he obeys, and selfish and rascally when he disobeys. He looses his moral
courage just as he comes to hate books and languages. In the end, John
Ruskin, tied so close to his mother's apron-string that he did not
escape even when he went to Oxford, and John Stuart Mill, whose father
ought to have been prosecuted for laying his son's childhood waste with
lessons, were superior, as products of training, to our schoolboys. They
were very conspicuously superior in moral courage; and though they did
not distinguish themselves at cricket and football, they had quite as
much physical hardihood as any civilized man needs. But it is to be
observed that Ruskin's parents were wise people who gave John a full
share in their own life, and put up with his presence both at home and
abroad when they must sometimes have been very weary of him; and Mill,
as it happens, was deliberately educated to challenge all the most
sacred institutions of his country. The households they were brought
up in were no more average households than a Montessori school is an
average school.




The Comings of Age of Children

All this inculcated adult docility, which wrecks every civilization as
it is wrecking ours, is inhuman and unnatural. We must reconsider our
institution of the Coming of Age, which is too late for some purposes,
and too early for others. There should be a series of Coming of Ages for
every individual. The mammals have their first coming of age when they
are weaned; and it is noteworthy that this rather cruel and selfish
operation on the part of the parent has to be performed resolutely, with
claws and teeth; for your little mammal does not want to be weaned, and