Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
There are, no doubt, many minor subjects, but this revision will at
least serve to indicate the scope and chief varieties of school work.
Out of some such miscellany it is that in most cases the student passes
to specialization, to a different and narrower process which aims at
a specific end, to the course of the College. In some cases this
specialized course may be correlated with a real and present practice,
as in the case of the musical, medical, and legal faculties of our
universities; it may be correlated with obsolete needs and practices
and regardless of modern requirements, as in the case of the student
of divinity who takes his orders and comes into a world full of the
ironical silences that follow great controversies, nakedly ignorant of
geology, biology, psychology, and modern biblical criticism; or it may
have no definite relation to special needs, and it may profess to be an
upward prolongation of schooling towards a sort of general wisdom and
culture, as in the case of the British “Arts” degrees. The ordinary
Oxford, Cambridge, or London B.A. has a useless smattering of Greek,
he cannot read Latin with any comfort, much less write or speak that
tongue; he knows a few unedifying facts round and about the classical
literature, he cannot speak or read French with any comfort; he has an
imperfect knowledge of the English language, insufficient to write it
clearly, and none of German, he has a queer, old-fashioned, and quite
useless knowledge of certain rudimentary sections of mathematics, and
an odd little bite out of history. He knows practically nothing of the
world of thought embodied in English literature, and absolutely nothing
of contemporary thought; he is totally ignorant of modern political
or social science, and if he knows anything at all about evolutionary
science and heredity it is probably matter picked up in a casual
way from the magazines. Art is a sealed book to him. Still, the
inapplicability of his higher education to any professional or practical
need in the world is sufficiently obvious, it seems, to justify the
claim that it has put him on a footing of thought and culture above the
level of a shopman. It is either that or nothing. And without deciding
between these alternatives, we may note here for our present purpose,
that the conception of a general upward prolongation of schooling beyond
adolescence, as distinguished from a specific upward prolongation into
professional training, is necessary to the complete presentation of the
school and college scheme in the modern state.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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