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
He was a strong man and in a very profound and simple way a good man,
and it was a very helpful thing to feel oneself his ally. But now that
he is gone, now that all his later projects and intentions shrivel and
fade and his great school recedes visibly towards the commonplace, I do
not know where to turn to do an effective stroke for education. It is
only schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and educational authorities
and school governors and school promoters and university teachers who
can really carry on the work that he began. In this book I have tried
to set out as clearly as possible, and largely in his own words, his
fundamental ideas of the supersession of competition by co-operation,
of the return of schools to real service and of a House of Vision, a
Temple of History and the Future, as the brain and centre of community
life. This present book is, as it were, a simplified diagram of the
teachings less luminously and more fully set out in the official Life.
One thing I shared with Sanderson altogether, and that was our
conviction that the present common life of men, at once dull and
disorderly, competitive, uncreative, cruelly stupid and stupidly
cruel, unless it is to be regarded merely as a necessary phase in the
development of a nobler existence, is a thing not worth having, that
it does not matter who drops dead or how soon we drop dead out of such
a world. Unless there is a more abundant life before mankind, this
scheme of space and time is a bad joke beyond our understanding, a
flare of vulgarity, an empty laugh, braying across the mysteries. But
we two shared the belief that latent in men and perceptible in men is a
greater mankind, great enough to make every effort to realise it fully
worth while, and to make the whole business of living worth while.
And the way to that realisation lies, we both believed, through thought
and through creative effort, through science and art and the school.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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