A year of prophesyingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
A year of prophesying
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization, Modern -- 20th century; Europe -- History -- 20th century; Great Britain -- History -- 20th century
This is not to be done by ignoring race and racial differences; the
natural thought forms, and dispositions and instinctive reactions of
northern Europeans and Jews, negroes and whites, Indians and Chinese,
vary subtly and profoundly; you can no more ignore differences of
race than differences of sex. They are things greatly intensified and
supplemented by differences of tradition, training, and conditions,
but when all such modifications are eliminated, essential differences
remain. Intermarriage provides no remedy but rather a multiplication of
types. But a well-directed education can at least restrain a passionate
exaggeration of these differences and prevent the antagonisms that
arise out of their recognition. Man is by nature a fierce resentful
being of excessive desires and facile prejudices, and no society has
ever existed or could ever exist without some sort of educational
adaptation of this natural savage, some schooling and toning down of
his hostile impulses. But the educational necessities of the small
and limited past are as nothing to the educational necessities of the
present time. If races are to be brought together, and not merely
jumbled together or still more dangerously held apart, an educational
effort has to be made on an altogether unprecedented scale.
An educational effort on an altogether unprecedented scale; that,
I take it, is the only way of escape from the chancy, disorderly,
restricted, and tragic life men are living now. The question of race,
like every other great question in human affairs so soon as we follow
it up, leads us to the school--no! it does not bring us to the school
as we know it, but to the site of the school, the crying blank for a
school that has yet to be. Get on with a school and college system
commensurate with the enormous needs and dangers of this new age
of world communication, or blunder and suffer. Teach everyone born
into the world the history of mankind, the significance of racial
differences, expand every individual imagination to the conception of
the racial life as a great adventure, and to some sense of what it may
achieve in the days to come. Replace the suspicious conservatism of
ignorance by the curiosity and generosity of wide vision. These are
enormous demands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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