Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
This physics course would cover an experimental quantitative treatment
of the electric current, it would glance in an explanatory way at many
of the phenomena of physical geography, and it would be correlated with
a study of the general principles of chemistry. A detailed knowledge of
chemical compounds is not a part of general education, it keeps better
in reference books than in the non-specialized head, and it is only the
broad conceptions of analysis and combination, and of the relation of
energy to chemical changes, that have to be attained. Beyond this, and
the application of map drawing to give accurate ideas and to awaken
interest in geography and history, it is open to discussion whether
any Fact subject need be taught as schooling at all. Ensure the full
development of a man’s mental capacity, and he will get his Fact as he
needs it. And if his mind is undeveloped he can make no use of any fact
he has. The subject called “Human Physiology” may be at once dismissed
as absurdly unsuitable for school use. One is always meeting worthy
people who “don’t see why children should not know something about
their own bodies,” and who are not apparently aware that the medical
profession after some generations of fairly systematic inquiry knows
remarkably little. Save for some general anatomy, it is impossible to
teach school-children anything true about the human body, because the
explanation of almost any physiological process demands a knowledge of
physical and chemical laws much sounder and subtler than the average
child can possibly attain. And as for botany, geology, history, and
geography (beyond the range already specified), these are far better
relegated to the school library and the initiative of each child.
Every child has its specific range of interest, and its specific way of
regarding things. In geology, for example, one boy may be fascinated
by the fossil hunting, another will find his interest in the effects of
structure in scenery, and a third, with more imagination, will give his
whole mind to the reconstruction of the past, and will pore over maps of
Pleistocene Europe and pictures of Silurian landscape with the keenest
appreciation. Each will be bored, or at least not greatly interested,
by what attracts the others. Let the children have an easily accessible
library--that is the crying need of nine hundred and ninety-nine out
of a thousand schools to-day, a need every school-seeking parent may do
something to remedy--and in that library let there be one or two good
densely illustrated histories, illustrated travels, bound volumes
of such a publication as Newnes’ _Wide World Magazine_ (I name these
publications haphazard--there are probably others as good or better),
Hutchinson and Co.’s _Living Animals of the World_, the Rev. H. N.
Hutchinson’s _Extinct Monsters_, the Badminton volumes on big game
shooting, mountaineering, and yachting, Kerner’s “Botany,” collections
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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