The Salvaging of CivilizationWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
The Salvaging of Civilization
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization, Modern -- 20th century; Education
Let me first suggest that every school should have a complete library
of very full and explicit lesson notes, properly sorted and classified.
All the ordinary subjects in schools have been taught over and over
again millions and millions of times. Few people, I think, realize that,
and fewer still realize the reasonable consequences of that. Human minds
are very much the same everywhere, and the best way of teaching every
ordinary school subject, the best possible lesson and the best possible
succession of lessons, ought to have been worked out to the last point,
and the courses ought to have been stereotyped long ago. Yet if you go
into any school to-day, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred you will
find an inexpert and ill-prepared young teacher giving a clumsy,
vamped-up lesson as though it had never been given before. He or she
will have no proper notes and no proper diagrams, and a halting and
faulty discourse will be eked out by feeble scratchings with chalk on a
blackboard, by querulous questioning of the pupils, and irrelevancies.
The thing is preposterous.
And linked up with this complete equipment of proper lesson notes upon
which the teacher will give the lessons, there should be a thing which
does not exist at present in any school and which ought to exist in
every school, a collection of some hundreds of thousands of pictures and
diagrams, properly and compactly filed; a copious supply of maps, views
of scenery, pictures of towns, and so forth for teaching geography,
diagrams and tables for scientific subjects, and so on and so on. You
must remember that if the schools of the world were thought of as a
whole and dealt with as a whole, these things could be produced
wholesale at a cost out of comparison cheaper than they are made to-day.
There is no reason whatever why school equipment should not be a world
market. A lesson upon the geography of Sweden needs precisely the same
maps, the same pictures of scenery, types of people, animals, cities,
and so forth, whether that lesson is given in China or Peru or Morocco
or London. There is no reason why these pictures and maps should not be
printed from the same blocks and distributed from the same centre for
the schools of all mankind. If the government of any large country had
the vigour and intelligence to go right ahead and manufacture a proper
equipment of notes and diagrams for its own use in all its own schools,
it would probably be able to recoup itself for most of the outlay by
dominating the map and diagram markets of the rest of the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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