from
cant, we can achieve freedom. But if we all freed our minds from cant
we should find that for the most part we should have to go on doing
the necessary work of the world exactly as we did it before until we
organized new and free methods of doing it. Many people believed in
secondary co-education (boys and girls taught together) before schools
like Bedales were founded: indeed the practice was common enough in
elementary schools and in Scotland; but their belief did not help them
until Bedales and St George's were organized; and there are still not
nearly enough co-educational schools in existence to accommodate all
the children of the parents who believe in co-education up to university
age, even if they could always afford the fees of these exceptional
schools. It may be edifying to tell a duke that our public schools are
all wrong in their constitution and methods, or a costermonger that
children should be treated as in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister instead of as
they are treated at the elementary school at the corner of his street;
but what are the duke and the coster to do? Neither of them has any
effective choice in the matter: their children must either go to the
schools that are, or to no school at all. And as the duke thinks with
reason that his son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does
not go to school, and the coster knows that his son will become an
illiterate hooligan if he is left to the streets, there is no real
alternative for either of them. Child life must be socially organized:
no parent, rich or poor, can choose institutions that do not exist; and
the private enterprise of individual school masters appealing to a
group of well-to-do parents, though it may shew what can be done by
enthusiasts with new methods, cannot touch the mass of our children.
For the average parent or child nothing is really available except the
established practice; and this is what makes it so important that the
established practice should be a sound one, and so useless for clever
individuals to disparage it unless they can organize an alternative
practice and make it, too, general.

The Pursuit of Manners

If you cross-examine the duke and the coster, you will find that they
are not concerned for the scholastic attainments of their children.
Ask the duke whether he could pass the standard examination of
twelve-year-old children in elementary schools, and he will admit,
with an entirely placid smile, that h