Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
Coming back now from these general propositions about books and teaching
to our mass of young people about fifteen years old, our adolescent
nation, who have accomplished their Schooling and are ready for the
College phase, we have to consider what subjects they are to be taught,
and how far they are to go with these subjects. Whether they are to give
all or part of their time to these College studies, whether they are
going to pursue them in evening classes or before breakfast in
the morning or during the livelong day is a question of secondary
conveniences that may very well be disregarded here. We are concerned
with the general architecture now, and not with the tactical necessities
of the clerk of the works. [Footnote: But I may perhaps point out here
how integral to a sane man-making scheme is the raising of the minimum
age at which children may work. A day will come, I hope, when even the
partial employment of children under fifteen will be prohibited, and
when, as Mr. Sidney Webb suggested some time ago, employment up to the
age of twenty-one will be limited to so few hours a week--his suggestion
was thirty--as to leave a broad margin for the more or less compulsory
college work and physical training that are becoming essential to the
modern citizen.]
We need waste little time nowadays, I submit, in disposing of
Encyclopaedic conceptions of College Education, conceptions that
played a part in almost all educational schemes--Bentham’s stupendous
Chrestomathia is the fearful example--before the middle nineteenth
century. We are all agreed in theory, at any rate, that to know one
subject or group of subjects exhaustively is far better than a universal
smattering, that the ideal of education is more particularly “all about
something” with “something about everything” in a very subordinate
place. The fact remains that the normal curriculum of our higher schools
and colleges is a pointless non-educational miscellany, and the
average graduate in Arts knows something, but not enough, of science,
mathematics, Latin, Greek, literature, and history; he has paid tribute
to several conflicting schemes of education, and is a credit to none. We
have to get rid of this state of affairs, and we have to provide (i)
a substantial mental training which shall lead at last to a broad
and comprehensive view of things, and which shall be a training
in generalization, abstraction, and the examination of evidence,
stimulating and disciplining the imagination and developing the habit of
patient, sustained, enterprising and thorough work, and (ii) we have
to add a general culture, a circle of ideas about moral, aesthetic,
and social matters that shall form a common basis for the social and
intellectual life of the community. The former of these two elements
must at some stage develop--after two or five or seven or some such
period of years, which may be different in different cases--into the
special training for the definite function of the individual in the
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