Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
secondary schools and sometimes colleges, and they have no distinct
boundary line to separate them from the University proper, on the
one hand, or the organized Science Schools and the Higher Grade Board
Schools and evening classes of the poorer sort. The Universities and
medical schools are, indeed, hampered with work quite similar to that of
secondary schools and which the secondary schools have failed to do,
the Cambridge undergraduate before his Little-Go, the London University
medical student before his Preliminary Scientific Examination, are
simply doing the belated work of this second stage. And there is, I
doubt not, a similar vague complexity in America. But through the fog
something very like the boundary line here placed about fourteen
is again and again made out; not only the general requirements for
efficient education, but the trend of present tendency seems to be
towards a scheme of three stages in which a first stage of nine or ten
years of increasingly serious Schooling (Primary Education), from a very
light beginning about five up to about fourteen, is to be followed by a
second stage of College education (Secondary Education), from fourteen
or sixteen to an upward boundary determined by class and various
facilities, and this is to be succeeded by a third stage, which we will
now proceed to consider in detail.
Let us make it clear at once that this third stage is a much ampler
thing than the graduation or post graduation work of a university. It
may or it may not include that as an ingredient. But the intention is to
express all those agencies (other than political, social, and economic
forces, and the suggestions that arise from them), that go to increase
and build up the mental structure of the man or woman. This includes the
pulpit, so far as it is still a vehicle for the importation of ideas
and emotions, the stage, books that do anything more than pass the time,
newspapers, the Grove and the Agora. These all, in greater or lesser
degrees, work powerfully together to make the citizen. They work most
powerfully, of course, in those plastic unsettled years that last from
adolescence to the middle twenties, but often in very slowly diminishing
intensity right into the closing decades of middle age. However things
may have been in the quieter past when newspapers did not exist, when
creeds were rigid, plays mere spectacles to be seen only “in Town,” and
books rare, the fact remains that to-day everybody goes much further and
learns far more than any of the professedly educational agencies can be
held accountable for. There was a time, perhaps, when a man really did
“settle down” intellectually, at the end of his days of learning, when
the only way--outside the libraries and households of a few princely
personages--to go on thinking and to participate in the secular
development of ideas, was to go to a University and hear and dispute.
But those days have gone for a hundred years at least. They have gone
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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