Great Britain -- Social conditions; Moral conditions; Social problems
Curiously enough, the other class of people who are impatient of the
design to stimulate their minds consists of the mass of the workers
themselves. After eight or nine or ten hours of heavy muscular work
every day, they say, they have no inclination or fitness for serious
literature, serious lectures, or serious art. They prefer a drink, a
bioscope, a music-hall. Eight hours' work, eight hours' play,
eight hours' sleep; that is the ideal. A very natural and
symmetrical ideal, but--it is just the ideal which "the
capitalist" wishes them to cultivate, and this might suggest
reflection. Someone will do the thinking while they play. Democratic
government is a mischief and a blunder unless Demos is capable of
thinking. If the workers of the world have an ambition to control
their destinies, they must realise that their destinies are things too
large and complex and important to be controlled by men with sleepy
brains. There is no solution of the broad social problem of this
planet which does not imply that every adult man and woman, of normal
powers, shall be alert and informed and self-assertive enough to take
an intelligent part in its administration.
Therefore, it seems to many that a scheme of education which ceases to
operate at the age of fourteen, which teaches children to read and has
no further concern with what they read, which impresses on their
cortex a mass of facts of no utility or stimulation, is not a
fulfilment of a nation's duty, or a proper consideration of a
nation's interest. The grander lessons of history, the more
impressive truths of science, the vital features of economics and
sociology, the ennobling characters of fine art, cannot be even
faintly impressed on the young mind. Yet they can be impressed on the
minds of nearly all adults, and it would be an incalculable gain to
the race if they were. What is being done, and what might be done, to
effect this?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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