How to begin to educate a child. First rule, leave him alone. Second rule, leave him alone. Third rule, leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.
Which doesn’t mean we are to let him starve, or put his fingers in the fire, or chew broken glass. That is mere neglect. As a little organism, he must have his proper environment. As a little individual he has his place and his limits: we also are individuals, and as such cannot allow him to make an unlimited nuisance of himself. But as a little person and a little mind, if you please, he does not exist. Personality and mind, like moustaches, belong to a certain age. They are a deformity in a child.
It is in this respect that we repeat, leave him alone. Leave his sensibilities, his emotions, his spirit, and his mind severely alone. There is the devil in mothers, that they must try to provoke personal recognition and personal response from their infants. They might as well start rubbing Tatcho on the tiny chin, to provoke a beard. Except that the Tatcho provocation will have no effect, unless perhaps a blister: whereas the emotional or psychic provocation has, alas, only too much effect.
For this reason babies should invariably be taken away from their modern mothers and given, not to yearning and maternal old maids, but to rather stupid fat women who can’t be bothered with them. There should be a league for the prevention of maternal love, as there is a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. The stupid fat woman may not guard so zealously against germs. But all the germs in the list of bacteriology are not so dangerous for a child as mother-love.
And why? Not for any thrilling Freudian motive, but because our now deadly idealism insists on idealizing every human relationship, but particularly that of mother and child. Heaven, how we all prostrate ourselves before the mother-child relationship, in all the grovelling degeneracy of Mariolatry! Highest, purest, most ideal of relationships, mother and child!
What nasty drivel! The mother-child relationship is certainly deep and important, but to make it high, or pure, or ideal is to make a nauseous perversion of it. A healthy, natural child has no high nature, no purity, and no ideal being. To stimulate these qualities in the infant is to produce psychic deformity, just as ugly as if we stimulated the growth of a beard on the baby face.
As far as all these high and personal matters go, leave the child alone. Personality and spiritual being mean with us our mental consciousness of our own self. A mother is to a high degree, alas, mentally conscious of her own self, her own exaltedness, her own mission, in these miserable days. And she wants her own mental consciousness reciprocated in the child. The child must recognize and respond. Alas, that the child cannot give her the greatest smack in the eye, every time she smirks and yearns for recognition and response. If we are to save the ultimate sanity of our children, it is down with mothers! A has les meres’.
Down to the right level. Pull them down from their exalted perches. No more of this Madonna smirking and yearning. No more soul. A mother should have ten strokes with the birch every time she “comes over” with soul or yearning love or aching responsibility. Ten hard, keen, stinging strokes on her bare back, each time. Be- or even, as in the legend, in a she-wolf. Suffice it that the two great dynamic centres, the solar plexus in the infant and the solar plexus in some external being, are seized into correspondence, and a vital circuit set up.
The vital circuit, we remark, is set up between two extraneous and individual beings, each separately existing. Yet the circuit embraces the two in a perfectly balanced unison. The mother and child are on the same plane. The mother is one in vital correspondence with the child. That is, in all her direct intercourse with the child she is as rudimentary as the child itself, her dynamic consciousness is as undeveloped and non-mental as the child’s.
Herein we have the true mother: she who corresponds with her child on the deep, rudimentary plane of the first dynamic consciousness. This correspondence is a sightless, mindless correspondence of touch and sound. The two dark poles of vital being must be kept constant in mother and infant, so that the flow is uninterrupted. This constancy is preserved by intimacy of contact, physical immediacy. But this physical immediacy does not make the two beings any less distinct and separate. It makes them more so. The child develops its own single, incipient self at its own primary centre; the mother develops her own separate, matured female self. The circuit of dynamic polarity which keeps the two equilibrized also produces each of them, produces the infant’s developing body and psyche, produces the perfected womanhood of the mother.
All this, so long as the circuit is not broken, the flow perverted. The circuit, the flow is kept as the child lies against the bosom of its mother, just as the circle of magnetic force is kept constant in a magnet, by the “keeper” which unites the two poles. The child which sleeps in its mother’s arms, the child which sucks its mother’s breast, the child which screams and kicks on its mother’s knee is established in a vital circuit with its parent, out of which circuit its being arises and develops. From pole to pole, direct, the current flows: from the solar plexus in the abdomen of the child to the solar plexus in the abdomen of the mother, from the cardiac plexus in the breast of the child to the cardiac plexus in the breast of the mother. The mouth which sucks, the little voice which calls and cries, both issue from the deep centres of the breast and bowels, giving expression from these centres, and not from the brain. The baby is not mentally vocal. It utters itself from the great affective centres. And this is why it has such power to charm or to madden us. The mother in her response utters herself from the same affective centres; her coos and callings also are unintelligible. Not the mind speaks, but the deep, happy bowels, the lively breast.
Introduce one grain of self-consciousness into the mother, as she chuckles and coos to her baby, and what then? The good life-flow instantly breaks. The sounds change. She begins to produce them deliberately,-under mental control. And what then? The deep affective centre in the baby is suddenly robbed, as when the mouth still sucking is suddenly snatched from the full breast. The vital flow is suddenly interrupted, and a new stimulus is applied to the child. There is a new provocation, a provocation for mental response from the infantile self-consciousness. And what then? The child either howls, or turns pale and makes this convulsed effort at mental- conscious, or self-conscious response. After which it is probably sick.
The same with the baby’s eyes. They do not see, mentally. Mentally, they are sightless and dark. But they have the remote, deep vision of the deep affective centres. And so a mother, laughing and clapping to her baby, has the same half-sightless, glaucous look in her eyes, vision non-mental and non-critical, the primary affective centres corresponding through the eyes, void of idea or mental cognition.
But rouse the devil of a woman’s self-conscious will, and she, clapping and cooing and laughing apparently just as before, will try to force a personal, conscious recognition into the eyes of the baby. She will try and try and try, fiendishly. And the child will blindly, instinctively resist. But with the cunning of seven legions of devils and the persistency of hell’s most hellish fiend, the cooing, clapping, devilish modern mother traduces the child into the personal mode of consciousness. She succeeds, and starts this hateful “personal” love between herself and her excited child, and the unspoken but unfathomable hatred between the violated infant and her own assaulting soul, which together make the bane of human life, and give rise to all the neurosis and neuritis and nervous troubles we are all afflicted with.
With children we must absolutely leave out the self-conscious and personal note. Communication must be remote and impersonal, a correspondence direct between the deep affective centres. And this is the reason why we must kick out all the personal fritter from the elementary schools. Stories must be tales, fables. They may have a flat moral if you like. But they must never have a personal, self- conscious note, the little-Mary-who-dies-and-goes-to-heaven touch, or the little-Alice-who-saw-a-fairy. This is the most vicious element in our canting infantile education today. “And you will all see fairies, dears, if you know how to look for them.”
It is perversion of the infant mind at the start. This continual introduction of a little child-heroine or -hero, with whom the little girl or the little boy can self-consciously identify herself or himself, stultifies all development at the true centres. Fairies are not a personal, mental reality. Alice Jenkinson, who lives in “The Laburnums,” Leslie Road, Brixton, knows quite well that fairies are all “my-eye.” But she is quite content to smirk self-consciously and say, “Yes, miss,” when teacher asks her if she’d like to see a fairy. It’s all very well playing games of pretence, so long as you enter right into the game, robustly, and forget your own pretensive self. But when, like the little Alices of today, you keep a constant self-conscious smirk on your nose all the time you’re “playing fairies,” then to hell with you and your fairies. And ten times to hell with the smirking, self-conscious “teacher” who encourages you. A hateful, self-tickling, self-abusive affair, the whole business.
And this is what is wrong, first and foremost, with our education: this attempt deliberately to provoke reactions in the great affective centres and to dictate these reactions from the mind. Fairies are true embryological realities of the human psyche. They are true and real for the great affective centres, which see as through a glass, darkly, and which have direct correspondence with living and naturalistic influences in the surrounding universe, correspondence which cannot have mental, rational utterance, but must express itself, if it be expressed, in preternatural forms. Thus fairies are true, and Little Red Riding Hood is most true.
But they are not true for Alice Jenkinson, smirking little minx. Because Alice Jenkinson is an incurably self-conscious little piece of goods, and she cannot act direct from the great affective centres, she can only act perversely, by reflection, from her personal consciousness. And therefore, for her, all fairies and princesses and Peters and Wendys should be put on the fire, and she should be spanked and transported to Newcastle, to have some of her self- consciousness taken out of her.
An inspector should be sent round at once to burn all pernicious Little Alice and Little Mary literature in the elementary schools, and empowered to cut down to one-half the salary of any teacher found smirking or smuggling or indulging in any other form of pretty self-consciousness and personal grace. Abolish all the bunkum, go back to the three R’s. Don’t cultivate any more imagination at all in children: it only means pernicious self-consciousness. Let us, for heaven’s sake, have children without imagination and without “nerves,” for the two are damnably inseparable.
Down with imagination in school, down with self-expression. Let us have a little severe hard work, good, clean, well-written exercises, well-pronounced words, well-set-down sums: and as far as head- work goes, no more. No more self-conscious dabblings and smirkings and lispings of “The silver birch is a dainty lady” (so is little Alice, of course). The silver birch must be finely downcast to see itself transmogrified into a smirky little Alice. The owl and the pussy-cat may have gone to sea in the pea-green boat, and the little girl may well have said: “What long teeth you’ve got, Grandmother!” This is well within the bounds of natural pristine experience. But that dainty-lady business is only self-conscious smirking.
It will be a long time before we know how to act or speak again from the deep affective centres, without self-conscious perversion. And therefore, in the interim, whilst we learn, let us abolish all pretence at naivete and childish self-expression. Let us have a bit of solid, hard, tidy work. And for the rest, leave the children alone. Pitch them out into the street or the playgrounds, and take no notice of them. Drive them savagely away from their posturings.
There must be an end to the self-conscious attitudinizing of our children. The self-consciousness and all the damned high-flownness must be taken out of them, and their little personalities must be nipped in the bud. Children shall be regarded as young creatures, not as young affected persons. Creatures, not persons.