The Salvaging of CivilizationWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
The Salvaging of Civilization
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization, Modern -- 20th century; Education
And on this broad foundation he will build up his knowledge of his own
particular state and nation and people, learning not tales of ancient
grievances and triumphs and revenges, but what his particular race and
countryside have given and what it gives and may be expected to give to
the common welfare of the world. On such foundations his social
consciousness will be built.
He will learn an outline of all that mankind knows and of the
fascinating realms of half knowledge in which man is still struggling to
know. His curiosity and his imagination will be roused and developed.
He will probably be educated continuously at least until he is eighteen
or nineteen, and perhaps until he is two or three and twenty. For a
world that wastes none of its resources upon armaments or soldiering,
and which produces whatever it wants in the regions best adapted to that
production, and delivers them to the consumer by the directest route,
will be rich enough not only to spare the first quarter of everybody's
life for education entirely, but to keep on with some education
throughout the whole lifetime.
Of course the school to which our young citizen of the world will go
will be very different from the rough and tumble schools of to-day,
understaffed with underpaid assistants, and having bare walls. It will
have benefited by some of the intelligence and wealth we lavish to-day
on range-finders and submarines.
Even a village school will be in a beautiful little building costing as
much perhaps as a big naval gun or a bombing-aeroplane costs to-day. I
know this will sound like shocking extravagance to many contemporary
hearers, but in the World State the standards will be different.
I don't know whether any of us really grasp what we are saying when we
talk of greater educational efficiency in the future. That means--if it
means anything--teaching more with much less trouble. It will mean, for
instance, that most people will have three or four languages properly
learnt; that they will think about things mathematical with a quickness
and clearness that puzzles us; that about all sorts of things their
minds will move in daylight where ours move in a haze of ignorance or in
an emotional fog.
This clear-headed, broad-thinking young citizen of the World State will
not be given up after his educational years to a life of toil--there
will be very little toil left in the world. Mankind will have machines
and power enough to do most of the toil for it. Why, between 1914 and
1918 we blew away enough energy and destroyed enough machinery and
turned enough good grey matter into stinking filth to release hundreds
of millions of toilers from toil for ever!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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