Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
that solitary children are below the average, but that all elder
children are inferior in quality. I do not believe this, but it would
be interesting and valuable if some one could find time for a wide and
thorough investigation of this question.]
V. THE MAN-MAKING FORCES OF THE MODERN STATE
So far we have concerned ourselves with the introductory and foundation
matter of the New Republican project, with the measures and methods that
may be resorted to, firstly, if we would raise the general quality
of the children out of whom we have to make the next generation,
and, secondly, if we would replace divergent dialects and partial
and confused expression by a uniform, ample and thorough knowledge of
English throughout the English-speaking world. These two things are
necessary preliminaries to the complete attainment of the more essential
nucleus in the New Republican idea. So much has been discussed. This
essential nucleus, thus stripped, reveals itself as the systematic
direction of the moulding forces that play upon the developing citizen,
towards his improvement, with a view to a new generation of individuals,
a new social state, at a higher level than that at which we live to-day,
a new generation which will apply the greater power, ampler knowledge
and more definite will our endeavours will give it, to raise its
successor still higher in the scale of life. Or we may put the thing
in another and more concrete and vivid way. On the one hand imagine an
average little child let us say in its second year. We have discussed
all that can be done to secure that this average little child shall be
well born, well fed, well cared for, and we will imagine all that can
be done has been done. Accordingly, we have a sturdy, beautiful healthy
little creature to go upon, just beginning to walk, just beginning to
clutch at things with its hands, to reach out to and apprehend things
with its eyes, with its ears, with the hopeful commencement of speech.
We want to arrange matters so that this little being shall develop into
its best possible adult form. That is our remaining problem.
Is our contemporary average citizen the best that could have been made
out of the vague extensive possibilities that resided in him when he was
a child of two? It has been shown already that in height and weight
he, demonstrably, is not, and it has been suggested, I hope almost
as convincingly, that in that complex apparatus of acquisition and
expression, language, he is also needlessly deficient. And even upon
this defective foundation, it is submitted, he still fails, morally,
mentally, socially, aesthetically, to be as much as he might be. “As
much as he might be,” is far too ironically mild. The average citizen
of our great state to-day is, I would respectfully submit, scarcely more
than a dirty clout about his own buried talents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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