Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
manual training and of the teaching of drawing. Neither of these
subjects entered into the school idea of any former period, so far as my
not very extensive knowledge of educational history goes.
Modern, too, is the development of efficient mathematical teaching; so
modern that for too many schools it is still a thing of tomorrow. The
arithmetic (without Arabic numerals, be it remembered) and the geometry
of the mediaeval quadrivium were astonishingly clumsy and ineffectual
instruments in comparison with the apparatus of modern mathematical
method. And while the mathematical subjects of the quadrivium were
taught as science and for their own sakes, the new mathematics is a sort
of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and
quantity and a means of expression, more exact, compact, and ready than
ordinary language. The great body of physical science, a great deal
of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and
political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who
have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not
be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation
as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide
states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to
compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to
be able to read and write. This development of mathematical teaching is
only another aspect of the necessity that is bringing the teaching of
drawing into schools, the necessity that is so widely, if not always
very intelligently perceived, of clearheadedness about quantity,
relative quantity, and form, that our highly mechanical, widely
extended, and still rapidly extending environments involve.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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