Treatise on Parents and Children   By: Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

By Bernard Shaw

CONTENTS

Parents and Children Trailing Clouds of Glory The Child is Father to the Man What is a Child? The Sin of Nadab and Abihu The Manufacture of Monsters Small and Large Families Children as Nuisances Child Fanciers Childhood as a State of Sin School My Scholastic Acquirements Schoolmasters of Genius What We Do Not Teach, and Why Taboo in Schools Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools What is to be Done? Children's Rights and Duties Should Children Earn their Living? Children's Happiness The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday University Schoolboyishness The New Laziness The Infinite School Task The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual Cowardice The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness The Common Sense of Toleration The Sin of Athanasius The Experiment Experimenting Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport Antichrist Under the Whip Technical Instruction Docility and Dependence The Abuse of Docility The Schoolboy and the Homeboy The Comings of Age of Children The Conflict of Wills The Demagogue's Opportunity Our Quarrelsomeness We Must Reform Society before we can Reform Ourselves The Pursuit of Manners Not too much Wind on the Heath, Brother Wanted: a Child's Magna Charta The Pursuit of Learning Children and Game: a Proposal The Parents' Intolerable Burden Mobilization Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs How Little We Know About Our Parents Our Abandoned Mothers Family Affection The Fate of the Family Family Mourning Art Teaching The Impossibility of Secular Education Natural Selection as a Religion Moral Instruction Leagues The Bible Artist Idolatry "The Machine" The Provocation to Anarchism Imagination Government by Bullies

PARENTS AND CHILDREN

Trailing Clouds of Glory

Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Force either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very low organisms: indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba is immortal. Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer than their friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants are believed to be capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human inhabitant. But the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves that they are not immortal. Do away with death and you do away with the need for birth: in fact if you went on breeding, you would finally have to kill old people to make room for young ones.