Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
But this analysis of the modifying factors in the home influence, this
formulation of its controllable elements, has now gone as far as the
purpose of this paper requires. It has worked out to this, that the
home, so far as it is not traditional organization, is really only on
the one hand an aspect of the general economic condition of the state,
and on the other of that still more fundamental thing, its general
atmosphere of thought. Our analysis refers back the man-maker to these
two questions. The home, one gathers, is not to be dealt with separately
or simply. Nor, on the other hand, are these questions to be dealt with
merely in relation to their home application. As the citizen grows
up, he presently emerges from his home influences to a more direct and
general contact with these two things, with the Fact of the modern state
and with the Thought of the modern state, and we must consider each of
these in relation to his development as a whole.
The next group of elements in the man-making complex that occurs to one
after the home, is the school. Let me repeat a distinction already drawn
between the home element in boarding-schools and the school proper.
While the child is out of the school-room, playing--except when it
is drilling or playing under direction--when it is talking with its
playmates, walking, sleeping, eating, it is under those influences that
it has been convenient for me to speak of as the home influence. The
schoolmaster who takes boarders is, I hold, merely a substitute for the
parent, the household of boarders merely a substitute for the family.
What is meant by school here, is that which is possessed in common by
day school and boarding-school--the schoolroom and the recess playground
part. It is something which the savage and the barbarian distinctively
do not possess as a phase in their making, and scarcely even its
rudimentary suggestion. It is a new element correlated with the
establishment of a wider political order and with the use of written
speech.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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