Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
rejected of the upper and wealthy class is, I admit, a difficult problem
as things are to-day. At present they carry a loutish ingredient to the
public schools, to the Army, to Oxford and Cambridge, and it is open to
question whether it would not be well to set aside one public school,
one especially costly university, and one gentlemen’s regiment of an
attractively smart type, into which this mass of expensive slackness
might be drained along a channel of specially high fees, low standards,
and agreeable social conditions. That, however, is a quite subsidiary
question in this discussion. A day may come, as I have already
suggested, when it will be considered as reasonable to insist upon a
minimum mental qualification for the administration of property as
for any other form of power in the state. Pride and their many
advantages--of which one is quite conceivably an average essential
superiority--will probably ensure a satisfactory result from the
Schooling process in the case of a much greater proportion of
better-class than of lower-class boys and girls. [Footnote: In most big
public schools, I am told, there is a system of superannuation about
sixteen, but I know nothing of the provision for those who are weeded
out.]
From the mass who show a satisfactory result at the end of the Schooling
process, the functional manhood and womanhood of our peoples have to be
developed, and we have now to discuss the nature of the second phase
of education, the phase that should be the mental parallel and
accompaniment of physical adolescence in all the citizens who are
to count for strength in the state. There is a break in the whole
development of the human being at this age, and it may very well be
paralleled by a break in methods and subjects of instruction. In Great
Britain, in the case of the wealthier classes, schooling and puerile
discipline is prolonged altogether too far, largely through the gross
incapacity of our secondary teachers. These men are unable, boring away
day after day, week after week, year after year, with vain repetitions,
imbecile breaks and new beginnings, through all the vast period from
eleven or twelve until twenty, to achieve that mastery of Latin and
Greek which was once the necessary preliminary to education, and which
has become at last, through the secular decline in scholastic energy
and capacity due to the withdrawal of interest in these studies, the
unattainable educational ideal. These classical pedagogues,
however, carry the thing up to three or four and twenty in the
Universities--though it is inconceivable that any language spoken
since the antediluvian age of leisure, can need more than ten years to
learn--and if they could keep the men until forty or fifty they would
still be fumbling away at the keys to the room that was ransacked long
ago. But with educated men as teachers and practical handbooks to help,
and practical examiners to guide them, there is no reason whatever why
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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