The Story of a Great SchoolmasterWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
The Story of a Great Schoolmaster
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Sanderson, F. W. (Frederick William), 1857-1922; School principals -- Great Britain -- Biography
The war turned Sanderson from a successful schoolmaster into an
amateur statesman. Life had become intolerable for him unless he could
interpret all its present disorders as the wreckage and confusion of
the house-breakers preparing the site for a far nobler and better
building. He shows himself at times by no means certain that this
would ever prove to be the case, but he had the brave man's assurance
that with luck and courage there was nothing impossible in the hope
that a more splendid human order might be built at last upon this
troubled and distressful planet. But for that to happen every possible
soul must be stirred, no latent will for order but must be roused
and brought into active service. He had no belief in hopeless and
irremediable vulgarity. People are mean, base, narrow, implacable,
unforgiving, contentious, selfish, competitive, because they have still
to see the creative light. Let that but shine upon them and seize them
and they would come into their places in that creative treatment of
life which ennobles the servant and enriches the giver, which is the
true salvation of souls.
He became a propagandist. He felt he had now made good sufficiently
in his school. He had established a claim as an able and successful
man to go out to able men, to business men, to influential men of all
sorts, and tell them the significance of this school of his, this
hand-specimen, this assay sample, of what could be done with the world.
He went to Chambers of Commerce, to Rotary Clubs, to Civic Assemblies,
to Luncheon gatherings of business men, to tell them of this idea of
organisation for service, instead of for profit and possession. He
tried to find industrial magnates who would take up the methods of
Oundle in productive organisation. He corresponded extensively with
such men as, for example, Lord Weir and Sir Alfred Yarrow and Lord
Bledisloe. He wanted to see them doing for industrial and agricultural
production what he had done for education, reconstructing it upon a
basis of corporate service, aiming primarily at creative achievement,
setting aside altogether competitive success or the amassing of private
wealth as the ends of human activity. Surely they would see how much
finer this new objective was, how much fuller and richer it must make
their own lives!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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