"The state now forces us to send our children to school, while ensuring that nothing much in the way of education occurs there. What passes for education in many British schools is really a process of demoralization, in which children are taken from their parents and surrendered to their peers. Today, significant numbers of young Britons leave school unable to read or do mental arithmetic. Useless old subjects like Latin, Greek, and higher mathematics have disappeared, and English grammar, with its oppressive rules and useless complexities, has been pushed aside as "elitist." As for manners, these have declined to such an extent that shops near London schools regularly close their doors to children, while older people seek refuge in another car when children board a train.
Instead of preparing children for adult life, our system of education ensures that they remain children, with all of childhood's self-centered incompetence but none of its redeeming innocence and shame. The state's attempt to sexualize children—encouraging members of the younger generation to master all the relevant positions by the age of 14, and making homosexuality a central part of their curriculum—doesn't help matters. Sex, pupils learn, is just an extension of childhood—another realm of play, in which all is permitted that could lead to enjoyment, and in which only the serious, the lasting, and the loving are dangerous.
The sixties' ideology, which caused such havoc in my own personal life, and the evil effects of which it took me 20 years to overcome, is now an obligatory basis of schooling, enforced from the tenderest age, and with complete disregard for the personal happiness and long-term hopes of the pupils. What I escaped only with the greatest difficulty and by the skin of my teeth is now being imposed as a general destiny. Surely, the first of my duties toward Sam is to ensure that he does not fall into the clutches of the people who want to do this to him.
The new curriculum, which has both the aim and the effect of cutting off children from their parents, making them unlovable to adults and the exclusive property of the state, springs from the minds of people who are themselves, for the most part, childless. It would be better, it seemed to us, for Sam to be sent down a coal mine, there to encounter the real world of adults, than to go through the complete course in demoralization that our rulers require. Even the private schools must follow the National Curriculum, which has been carefully devised to remove all the knowledge that Sophie and I value and to substitute the "life skills" needed in an urban slum.
The only solution that has occurred to us so far is to educate Sam ourselves for as long as time, energy, and knowledge permit and then to send him to the Lycée Francaise in London, on the understanding that the French have been slightly less contemptuous toward their national culture than we have been. As to what Sam's curriculum should be, common sense directs us down the old and beaten path. And we shall start him off with Grimm, Andersen, and Lewis Carroll, since their brand of children's literature does not merely enlarge the imagination: it also educates the moral sense.
While pondering this matter, however, I was invited by a national newspaper to describe what we intended for Sam—a sign that many people share our concerns. Naturally, I assured the readers, if John Stuart Mill could read Greek at six, why not Sam? And maybe Sam's first public utterance could match that of the four-year-old Macaulay, deflecting the meddlesome attentions of a toddler-coddler, after he had hurt himself, with the words: "I thank you, Madam, the agony is abated." Sam would be kept away from pop music and television but would study the viola as a salutary form of self-abasement. He would be introduced to horses and fox hunting, so as to learn both to care for animals and to do so unsentimentally. He would be taught the virtues—courage, justice, prudence, and temperance—in their Christian version, as forms of faith, hope, and charity. And although Sam would probably not enjoy his childhood, I wrote, he would emerge from it as someone agreeable to others, whether or not happy in himself.
The article precipitated a storm of abuse from experts in child-rearing, educational gurus, feminists, and assorted believers in progress—all manifestly products of an education system that identifies irony as an elitist crime and has therefore extinguished the ability to understand it. For several weeks, we lived in dread of the social workers. If we could not answer their inquiries, we feared, Sam would be put into foster care, denied all access to his parents, and given a normal diet of pop, television, and takeout.
The experts who greeted our educational plans with such outrage were, after all, the voice of our modern culture—the very same culture that has shaped the educational system and set up the state in opposition to the family. It is only since becoming part of a family that I have fully gauged the depth and seriousness of this opposition. The family has become a subversive institution—almost an underground conspiracy—at war with the state and the state-sponsored culture.
Hence the official curriculum has rigorously excluded the family. Mothers appear from time to time in schoolbooks, but they are conspicuously single. Fathers are never mentioned—indeed, they have become unmentionable, as trousers were to our Victorian ancestors. The state-imposed sex education is designed to sever the link between sex and the family, by showing the family to be merely an "option." Sex education will ensure that the next generation will not form families, since it will have destroyed in its pupils everything that leads one sex to idealize the other and so to channel erotic feelings into marriage.
But Sophie and I have no doubt that it is the family, not the state, that fulfills us. Hence we have decided to follow our own instincts and observations, and to bring up our children as we believe to be right. We are members of a growing class of criminals, who have declared war on the state-sponsored culture and are prepared to challenge it.
This official culture is founded on the premise that the human material is infinitely plastic and can be molded by the state into any shape required. This is one of the first of the official doctrines that you learn, as a parent, to doubt. We compared Sam with other boys and could not help remarking how similar they are in one fundamental respect: which is, that they all want to be men. Moreover, they all associate manliness with action, with the use of tools, with the making of something out of nothing, and with power and the machines that produce it...
The official doctrine attributes such tendencies to culture: change the toys, the role models, and the contexts, the experts say, and boys will dress up, play with dolls, coddle animals, and make little interiors where they can be snug as a bug in a rug. But there seems to be a paucity of supporting evidence for such a view. Science, common sense, and recorded history all point to the conclusion that sex is a constant, which influences what can be achieved and what can be desired. Rather than work against it, we should work with it, to use its vast and unconscious power to drive our civilizing purpose.
The birth of our baby girl Lucy again awoke our curiosity in this respect, and while we of course intend to bring her up in the same improving regime that we proposed for Sam, we are fairly sure that she will not be seen, 12 months hence, with a trowel in her hand. Lucy's first smile was enough to convince us of this. Whereas Sam grinned broadly and mischievously, and then reached out to tear down the toy horse that hung above his crib, Lucy offered a serene, observing twinkle. Friends and neighbors all confirm the view that little girls are interested in people, in words, in the intimate togetherness of home, and that tools and machines fail to awaken their sympathies.
Why should people resist the obvious, when it comes to sexual roles? The answer, I believe, goes to the heart of our modern anxieties. In the world described by Jane Austen, men and women enjoyed separate spheres of action, the first public, the second private, the first involving influence without intimacy, the second an intimacy that was also a form of far-reaching, though publicly hidden, influence. Dress, manners, education, recreation, and language all reinforced this division, with marriage as the great life-choice in which it culminated and whose purpose it was. Because there is no going back to Jane Austen's world, we take refuge in the belief that every aspect of it reflects some arbitrary cultural imperative, with nothing due to permanent human nature. By extending cultural relativism even into those spheres where it is not culture but nature that determines what we do, we deceive ourselves into accepting—but with anxiety—a situation so novel that our ancestors never even thought to guard against it: the situation in which men and women are exchangeable in all their social roles and all their spheres of action.
It seems to me, however, that we do our children a disservice if we fail to acknowledge that their sexual nature sets them from the beginning on different paths. We should learn not to deny sex but to idealize it—to set before our children an image of the good man and the good woman, and to teach them to imitate what can be loved and admired. Even without the old division of roles, we can envisage alternative forms of role-playing that serve a comparable function—that rescue sex from animal appetite and make it the foundation of a lasting commitment.
Children, in their innocence, have an inkling of this...
The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness, as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant. But on what fund of knowledge are we to draw when framing our alternative? The utopias have proved to be illusions, and the most evident result of our "liberation" from traditional constraints has been widespread discontent with the human condition."
