Herbert Wells - The Salvaging Of Civilisation

You see that in all this I am driving at—what shall I call it?—syndicated schools, syndicated lesson notes, and, so far as equipment goes, mass production. I want to see the sort of thing happening to schools that has already happened to many sorts of retail shops. In the place of little ill-equipped schools, each run by its own teacher and buying its own books and diagrams and material and so forth in small quantities at high prices, I want to see a great central organization, employing teachers of genius, working in consultation and co-operation and producing lesson notes, diagrams, films, phonograph records, cheaply, abundantly, on a big scale for a nation, or a group of nations, or, if you like, for all the world, just as America produces watches and alarum clocks and cheap automobiles for all the world. And I want to see the schools of the world being run, so far as the intellectual training goes, not by local committees but by that central organization .

It is only by this reorganization of schooling upon the lines of big production that we can hope to get a civilized community in the world at an educational level very markedly higher than the existing educational level.

But if we could so economize teaching energy—if we made our really great teachers, by the use of modern appliances, teachers not of handfuls but of millions; if we insisted upon a universal application of the best and most effective methods of teaching, just as we insist upon the best and most effective methods of street traction and town lighting—then I believe it would be possible to build the civilization of the years to come on a foundation of mental preparation incomparably sounder and higher than anything we know of to-day.

And now let us go on to the next stages of education.

The schooling process is a natural phase in human development—it is our elaboration of the natural learning of boyhood and girlhood and of adolescence. There was schooling before schools; there was schooling before humanity. I have watched a cat schooling her kittens. Schooling is a part of being young. And we grow up. So there comes a time when schooling is over, when the process of equipment gives place to an increasing share in the activities and decisions of adult life.

Nevertheless for us education must still go on.

I suppose that the savage or the barbarian or the peasant in any part of the world or the uneducated man anywhere would laugh if you told him that the adult must still learn. But in our modern world—I mean the more or less civilized world of the last twenty-five centuries or so—there has grown up a new idea—new, I mean, in the sense that it runs counter to the life scheme of primitive humanity and of most other living things—and that is the idea that one can go on learning right up to the end of life . It marks off modern man from all animals, that in his adult life he can display a sense that there remains something still to be investigated and wisdom still to be acquired.

I do not know enough history to tell you with any confidence when adult men, instead of just going about the business of life after they had grown up, continued to devote themselves to learning, to a deliberate prolongation of what is for all other animals an adolescent phase. But by the time of Buddha in India and Confucius in China and the schools of the philosophers in the Greek world the thing was in full progress. That was twenty-six centuries ago or more.

Something of the sort may have been going on in the temples of Egypt or Samaria a score of centuries before. I do not know. You must ask some such great authority as Professor Breasted about that. It may be fifty or a hundred centuries since men, although they were fully grown up, still went on trying to learn.

The idea of adult learning has spread ever since. To-day I suppose most educated people would agree that so long as we live we learn and ought to learn—that we ought to develop our ideas and enlarge, correct and change our ideas.

But even to-day you will find people who have not yet acquired this view. You will find even teachers and doctors and business men who are persuaded that they had learnt all that there was to learn by twenty-five or thirty. It is only quite recently that this idea has passed beyond a special class and pervaded the world generally—the idea of everyone being a life-long student and of the whole world becoming, as it were, a university for those who have passed beyond the schooling stage.

It has spread recently because in recent years the world has changed so rapidly that the idea of settling down for life has passed out of our minds, has given place to a new realization of the need of continuous adaptation to the very end of our days. It is no good settling down in a world that, on its part, refuses to do anything of the sort.

But hitherto, before these new ideas began to spread in our community, the mass of men and women definitely settled down . At twelve, or fifteen, or sixteen, or twenty it was decided that they should stop learning. It has only been a rare and exceptional class hitherto that has gone on learning throughout life. The scene and field of that learning hitherto has been, in our Western communities, the University. Essentially the University is and has been an organization of adult learning as distinguished from preparatory and adolescent learning.

But between the phase of schooling and the phase of adult learning there is an intermediate stage.

In Scotland and America that is distinguished and thought of clearly as the college stage . But in England, where we do not think so clearly, this college stage is mixed up with and done partly at school and partly in the University. It is not marked off so definitely from the stage of general preparation that precedes it or from the stage of free intellectual enterprise that follows it.

Now what should college give the young citizen, male or female, upon the foundation of schooling we have already sketched out? In practice we find a good deal of technical study comes into the college stage. The budding lawyer begins to read law, the doctor starts his professional studies, the future engineer becomes technical, and the young merchant sets to work, or should do, to study the great movements of commerce and business method and organization.

As the college stage of those who do not, as a matter of fact, go to college, we have now in every civilized country the evening continuation school, the evening technical school and the works school.

But important as these things are from the point of view of service, they are not the soul —not the real meaning of the college stage.

The soul of the college stage, the most important value about it, is that in it is a sort of preparatory pause and inspection of the whole arena of life. It is the educational concomitant of the stage of adolescence.

The young man and the young woman begin to think for themselves, and the college education is essentially the supply of stimulus and material for that process.

It was in the college stage that most of us made out our religion and made it real for ourselves. It was then we really took hold of social and political ideas, when we became alive to literature and art, when we began the delightful and distressful enterprise of finding ourselves.

And I think most of us will agree when we look back that the most real thing in our college life was not the lecturing and the lessons—very much of that stuff could very well have been done in the schooling stage—but the arguments of the debating society, the discussions that broke out in the classroom or laboratory, the talks in one's rooms about God and religion, about the state and freedom, about art, about every possible and impossible social relationship.