College, Newspaper and Books: The Next Stages of Education

The Salvaging of Civilization, by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK

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[Pg 167] 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[Pg 168] 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[Pg 169] 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[Pg 170] 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.

Now in addition to that I had something else in my own college course—something of the same sort of thing but better.

I have spoken of myself as under-educated. My schooling was shocking but, as a blessed compensation, my college stage was rather exceptionally good. My schooling ended when I was thirteen. My father, who was a professional cricketer, was smashed up by an accident, and I had three horrible years in employment in shops. Then my luck changed and I found myself under one of the very greatest teachers of his time, Professor Huxley. I worked at the Royal College of Science[Pg 171] in London for one year under him in his great course in zoology, and for a year and a half under a very good but rather uninspiring teacher, Professor Judd, the geologist. I did also physics and astronomy. Altogether I had three full years of science study. And the teaching of biology at that time, as Huxley had planned it, was a continuing, systematic, illuminating study of life, of the forms and appearances of life, of the way of life, of the interplay of life, of the past of life and the present prospect of life. It was a tremendous training in the sifting of evidence and the examination of appearances.

Every man is likely to be biassed, I suppose, in favour of his own educational course. Yet it seems to me that those three years of work were educational—that they gave a vision of the universe as a whole and a discipline and a power such as no other course, no classical or mathematical course I have ever had a chance of testing, could do.

I am so far a believer in a biological backbone for the college phase of education that I have secured it for my sons and I have done all I can to extend it in England. Nevertheless, important as that formal college work was to me, it still seems to me that the informal part of our college life—the talk, the debates, the discussion, the scampering about London to attend great political meetings, to hear William Morris on Socialism, Auberon Herbert on Individualism, Gladstone on Home Rule, or Bradlaugh on Atheism—for those[Pg 172] were the lights of my remote student days—was about equally important.

If schooling is a training in expression and communication, college is essentially the establishment of broad convictions. And in order that they may be established firmly and clearly, it is necessary that the developing young man or woman should hear all possible views and see the medal of truth not only from the obverse but from the reverse side.

Now here again I want to put the same sort of questions I have put about schooling.

Is the college stage of our present educational system anywhere near its maximum possible efficiency? And could it not be extended from its present limited range until it reached practically the whole adolescent community?

Let me deal with the first of these questions first.

Could we not do much more than we do to make the broad issues of various current questions plain and accessible to our students in the college stage?

For example, there is a vast discussion afoot upon the questions that centre upon Property, its rights and its limitations. There is a great literature of Collectivist Socialism and Guild Socialism and Communism. About these things our young people must know. They are very urgent questions; our sons and daughters will have to begin to deal with them from the moment they leave college. Upon them they must form working[Pg 173] opinions, and they must know not only what they themselves believe but, if our public affairs are not to degenerate into the squalid, obstinate, hopeless conflicts of prejudiced adherents, they must know also what is believed by other people whose convictions are different from theirs.

You may want to hush these matters up. Many elderly people do. You will fail.

All our intelligent students will insist upon learning what they can of these discussions and forming opinions for themselves. And if the college will not give them the representative books, a fair statement of the facts and views, and some guidance through the maze of these questions, it means merely that they will get a few books in a defiant or underhand way and form one-sided and impassioned opinions.

Another great set of questions upon which the adolescent want to judge for themselves, and ought to judge for themselves, are the religious questions.

And a third group are those that determine the principles of sexual conduct.

I know that in all these matters, on both sides of the Atlantic, a great battle rages between dogma and concealment on the one hand and open ventilation on the other.

Upon the issue I have no doubt. I find it hard even to imagine the case for the former side.

So long as schooling goes on, the youngster is immature, needs to be protected, is not called upon for judgments and initiatives, and may well[Pg 174] be kept under mental limitations. I do not care very much how you censor or select the reading and talking and thinking of the schoolboy or schoolgirl. But it seems to me that with adolescence comes the right to knowledge and the right of judgment. And that it is the task and duty of the college to give matters of opinion in the solid—to let the student walk round and see them from every side.

Now how is this to be done?

I suggest that to begin with we open wide our colleges to propaganda of every sort. There is still a general tendency in universities on both sides of the Atlantic to treat propaganda as infection. For the adolescent it is not—it is a stimulating drug.

Let me instance my own case. I am a man of Protestant origins and with a Protestant habit of mind. But it is a matter of great regret to me that there is no good Roman Catholic propaganda available for my sons in their college life. I would like to have the old Mother Church giving my boys an account of herself and of the part she has played in the history of the world, telling them what she stands for and claims to be, giving her own account of the Mass. These things are interwoven with our past; they are part of us. I do not like them to go into a church and stare like foreigners and strangers at the altar.

And side by side with that Catholic propaganda I would like them to hear an interpretation of religious origins and church history by some non[Pg 175]-catholic or sceptical ethnologist. He, too, should be free to tell his story and drive his conclusions home.

But you will find most colleges and most college societies bar religious instruction and discussion. What do they think they are training? Some sort of genteel recluse—or men and women?

So, too, with the discussion of Bolshevism. I do not know how things are in America but in England there has been a ridiculous attempt to suppress Bolshevik propaganda. I have seen a lot of Bolshevik propaganda and it is not very convincing stuff. But by suppressing it, by police seizures of books and papers and the like, it has been invested with a quality of romantic mystery and enormous significance. Our boys and girls, especially the brighter and more imaginative, naturally enough think it must be tremendous stuff to agitate the authorities in this fashion.

At our universities, moreover, the more loutish types of student have been incited to attack and smash up the youths suspected of such reading. This gives it the glamour of high intellectual quality.

The result is that every youngster in the British colleges with a spark of mental enterprise and self-respect is anxious to be convinced of Bolshevik doctrine. He believes in Lenin—because he has been prevented from reading him. Sober collectivists like myself haven't a chance with him.

But you see my conception of the college[Pg 176] course? Its backbone should be the study of biology and its substance should be the threshing out of the burning questions of our day.

You may object to this that I am proposing the final rejection of that discipline in classical philosophy which is still claimed as the highest form of college education in the world——the sort of course that the men take in what is called Greats at Oxford. You will accuse me of wanting to bury and forget Aristotle and Plato, Heraclitus and Lucretius, and so forth and so on.

But I don't want to do that—so far as their thought is still alive. So far as their thought is still alive these men will come into the discussion of living questions now. If they are Ancients and dead then let them be buried and left to the archæological excavator. If they are still Moderns and alive, I defy you to bury them if you are discussing living questions in a full and honest way. But don't go hunting after them, there are still modern Immortals in the darkness of a forgotten language. Don't make a superstition of them. Let them come hunting after you. Either they are unavoidable if your living questions are fully discussed, or they are irrelevant and they do not matter. That there is a wisdom and beauty in the classics which is incommunicable in any modern language, which obviously neither ennobles nor empowers, but which is nevertheless supremely precious, is a kind of nonsense dear to the second-rate classical don, but it has nothing endearing[Pg 177] about it for any other human beings. I will not bother you further with that sort of affectation here.

And this college course I have sketched should, in the modern state, pass insensibly into adult mental activities.

Concurrently with it there will be going on, as I have said, a man's special technical training. He will be preparing himself for a life of industrialism, commerce, engineering, agriculture, medicine, administration, education or what not. And as with the man, so with the woman. That, too, is a process which in this changing new world of ours can never be completed. Neither of these college activities will ever really leave off. All through his life a man or woman should be confirming, fixing or modifying his or her general opinions; and all the time his or her technical knowledge and power should be consciously increased.

And now let me come to the second problem we opened up in connection with college education—the problem of its extension.

Can we extend it over most or all of a modern population?

I don't think we can, if we are to see it in terms of college buildings, class rooms, tutors, professors and the like. Here again, just as in the case of schooling, we have to raise the neglected problem—neglected so far as education goes—of economy of effort; and we have to look once more at the new facilities that our educational institutions have[Pg 178] so far refused to utilize. Our European colleges and universities have a long and honourable tradition that again owes much to the educational methods of the Roman Empire and the Hellenic world. This tradition was already highly developed before the days of printing from movable type, and long before the days when maps or illustrations were printed. The higher education, therefore, was still, as it was in the Stone Age, largely vocal. And the absence of paper and so forth, rendering notebooks costly and rare, made a large amount of memorizing necessary. For that reason the mediæval university teacher was always dividing his subject into firstly and secondly and fourthly and sixthly and so on, so that the student could afterwards tick off and reproduce the points on his fingers—a sort of thumb and finger method of thought—still to be found in perfection in the discourses of that eminent Catholic apologist, Mr. Hilaire Belloc. It is a method that destroys all sense of proportion between the headings; main considerations and secondary and tertiary points get all catalogued off as equivalent numbers, but it was a mnemonic necessity of those vanished days.

And they have by no means completely vanished. We still use the lecture as the normal basis of instruction in our colleges, we still hear discourses in the firstly, secondly and thirdly form, and we still prefer even a second-rate professor on the spot to the printed word of the ablest teacher at a distance. Most of us who have been through[Pg 179] college courses can recall the distress of hearing a dull and inadequate view of a subject being laboriously unfolded in a long series of tedious lectures, in spite of the existence of full and competent text-books. And here again it would seem that the time has come to centralize our best teaching, to create a new sort of wide teaching professor who will teach not in one college but in many, and to direct the local professor to the more suitable task of ensuring by a commentary, by organized critical work, and so forth, that the text-book is duly read, discussed and compared with the kindred books in the college library.

This means that the great teaching professors will not lecture, or that they will lecture only to try over their treatment of a subject before an intelligent audience as a prelude to publication. They may perhaps visit the colleges under their influence, but their basis instrument of instruction will be not a course of lectures but a book. They will carry out the dictum of Carlyle that the modern university is a university of books.

Now the frank recognition of the book and not the lecture as the substantial basis of instruction opens up a large and interesting range of possibilities. It releases the process of learning from its old servitude to place and to time. It is no longer necessary for the student to go to a particular room, at a particular hour, to hear the golden words drop from the lips of a particular teacher. The young man who reads at eleven o'clock in the morning in[Pg 180] luxurious rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, will have no very marked advantage over another young man, employed during the day, who reads at eleven o'clock at night in a bed-sitting-room in Glasgow. The former, you will say, may get commentary and discussion, but there is no particular reason why the latter should not form some sort of reading society with his fellows, and discuss the question with them in the dinner hour and on the way to the works. Nor is there any reason why he should not get tutorial help as a university extension from the general educational organization, as good in quality as any other tutorial help.

And this release of the essentials of a college education from limitations of locality and time brought about by modern conditions, not only makes it unnecessary for a man to come "up" to college to be educated, but abolishes the idea that his educational effort comes to an end when he goes "down." Attendance at college no longer justifies a claim to education; inability to enter a college is no longer an excuse for illiteracy.

I do not think that our educational and university authorities realize how far the college stage of education has already escaped from the local limitations of colleges; they do not understand what a great and growing volume of adolescent learning and thought, of college education in the highest and best sense of the word, goes on outside the walls of colleges altogether; and on the other they do not grasp the significant fact that, thanks[Pg 181] to the high organization of sports and amusements and social life in our more prosperous universities, a great proportion of the youngsters who come in to their colleges never get the realities of a college education at all, and go out into the world again as shallow and uneducated as they came in. And this failure to grasp the great change in educational conditions brought about, for the most part, in the last half-century, accounts for the fact that when we think of any extension of higher education in the modern community we are all too apt to think of it as a great proliferation of expensive, pretentious college buildings and a great multiplication of little teaching professorships, and a further segregation of so many hundreds or thousands of our adolescents from the general community, when as a matter of fact the reality of education has ceased to lie in that direction at all. The modern task is not to multiply teachers but to exalt and intensify exceptionally good teachers, to recognize their close relationship with the work of university research—which it is their business to digest and interpret—and to secure the production and wide distribution of books throughout the community.

I am inclined to think that the type of adolescent education, very much segregated in out-of-the-way colleges and aristocratic in spirit, such as goes on now at Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Holloway, Wellesley and the like, has probably reached and passed its maximum development. I doubt if the modern community can afford to con[Pg 182]tinue it; it certainly cannot afford to extend it very widely.

But as I have pointed out, there has always been a second strand to college education—the technical side, the professional training or apprenticeship. Here there are sound reasons that the student should go to a particular place, to the special museums and laboratories, to the institutes of research, to the hospitals, factories, works, ports, industrial centres and the like where the realities he studies are to be found, or to the studios or workshops or theatres where they practise the art to which he aspires. Here it seems we have natural centres of aggregation in relation to which the college stage of a civilized community, the general adolescent education, the vision of the world as a whole and the realization of the individual place in it, can be organized most conveniently.

You see that what I am suggesting here is in effect that we should take our colleges, so far as they are segregations of young people for general adolescent education, and break them as a cook breaks eggs—and stir them up again into the general intellectual life of the community.

Coupled with that there should, of course, be a proposal to restrict the hours of industrial work or specialized technical study up to the age of twenty, at least, in order to leave time for this college stage in the general education of every citizen of the world.

The idea has already been broached that men[Pg 183] and women in the modern community are no longer inclined to consider themselves as ever completely adult and finished; there is a growing disposition and a growing necessity to keep on learning throughout life. In the worlds of research, of literature and art and economic enterprise, that adult learning takes highly specialized forms which I will not discuss now; but in the general modern community the process of continuing education after the college stage is still evidently only at a primitive level of development. There are a certain number of literary societies and societies for the study of particular subjects; the pulpit still performs an educational function; there are public lectures and in America there are the hopeful germs of what may become later on a very considerable organization of adult study in the Lyceum Chautauqua system; but for the generality of people the daily newspaper, the Sunday newspaper, the magazine and the book constitute the only methods of mental revision and enlargement after the school or college stage is past.

Now we have to remember that the bulk of this great organization of newspapers and periodicals and all the wide distribution of books that goes on to-day are extremely recent things. This new nexus of print has grown up in the lifetime of four or five generations, and it is undergoing constant changes. We are apt to forget its extreme newness in history and to disregard the profound difference in mental conditions it makes between[Pg 184] our own times and any former period. It is impossible to believe that thus far it is anything but a sketch and intimation of what it will presently be. It has grown. No man foresaw it; no one planned it. We of this generation have grown up with it and are in the habit of behaving as though this nexus had always been with us and as though it would certainly remain with us. The latter conclusion is almost wilder than the former.

By what we can only consider a series of fortunate accidents, the press and the book world have provided and do provide a necessary organ in the modern world state, an organ for swift general information upon matters of fact and for the rapid promulgation and diffusion of ideas and interpretations. The newspaper grew, as we know, out of the news-letter which in a manuscript form existed before the Roman Empire; it owes its later developments largely to the advertisement possibilities that came with the expansion of the range of trading as the railways and suchlike means of communication developed. Modern newspapers have been described, not altogether inaptly, as sheets of advertisements with news and discussions printed on the back. The extension of book reading from a small class, chiefly of men, to the whole community has also been largely a response to new facilities; though it owes something also to the religious disputes of the last three centuries. The population of Europe, one may say with a certain truth, first learnt to read the Bible, and only[Pg 185] afterwards to read books in general. A large proportion of the book publishing in the English language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries still consisted of sermons and controversial theological works.

Both newspaper and book production began in a small way as the enterprise of free individuals, without anyone realizing the dimensions to which the thing would grow. Our modern press and book trade, in spite of many efforts to centralize and control it, in spite of Defence of the Realm Acts and the like, is still the production of an unorganized multitude of persons. It is not centralized; it is not controlled. To this fact the nexus of print owes what is still its most valuable quality. Thoughts and ideas of the most varied and conflicting sort arise and are developed and worked out and fought out in this nexus, just as they do in a freely thinking vigorous mind.

I am not, you will note, saying that this freedom is perfect or that the thought process of the print nexus could not go very much better than it does, but I am saying that it has a very considerable freedom and vigour and that so far as it has these qualities it is a very fine thing indeed.

Now many people think that we are moving in the direction of world socialism to-day. Collectivism is perhaps a better, more definite word than socialism, and, so far as keeping the peace goes, and in matters of transport and communication, trade, currency, elementary education, the pro[Pg 186]duction and distribution of staples and the conservation of the natural resources of the world go, I believe that the world and the common sense of mankind move steadily towards a world collectivism. But the more co-operation we have in our common interests, the more necessary is it to guard very jealously the freedom of the mind, that is to say, the liberty of discussion and suggestion.

It is here that the Communist regime in Russia has encountered its most fatal difficulty. A catastrophic unqualified abolition of private property has necessarily resulted in all the paper, all the printing machinery, all the libraries, all the news-stalls and book shops, becoming Government property. It is impossible to print anything without the consent of the Government. One cannot buy a book or newspaper; one must take what the Government distributes. Free discussion—never a very free thing in Russia—has now on any general scale become quite impossible. It was a difficulty foreseen long ago in Socialist discussions, but never completely met by the thorough-paced Communist. At one blow the active mental life of Russia has been ended, and so long as Russia remains completely and consistently communist it cannot be resumed. It can only be resumed by some surrender of paper, printing and book distribution from absolute Government ownership to free individual control. That can only be done by an abandonment of the full rigours of communist theory.[Pg 187]

In our western communities the dangers to the intellectual nexus lie rather on the other side. The war period produced considerable efforts at Government control and as a consequence considerable annoyance to writers, much concealment and some interference with the expression of opinion; but on the whole both newspapers and books held their own. There is to-day probably as much freedom of publishing as ever there was. It is not from the western governments that mischief is likely to come to free intellectual activity in the western communities but from the undisciplined individual, and from the incitements to mob violence by propagandist religions and cults against free discussion.

About the American press I know and can say little. I will speak only of things with which I am familiar. I am inclined to think that there has been a considerable increase of deliberate lying in the British press since 1914, and a marked loss of journalistic self-respect. Particular interests have secured control of large groups of papers and pushed their particular schemes in entire disregard of the general mental well-being. For instance, there has recently been a remarkable boycott in the London press of a very able collectivist book, Sir Leo Money's Triumph of Nationalization, because it would have interfered with the operation of very large groups which were concerned in getting back public property into private hands on terms advantageous to the latter. It is a book not only important as a statement of a peculiar[Pg 188] economic view, but because of the statesmanlike gravity and clearness of its exposition. I do not think it would have been possible to stand between the public and a writer in this way in the years before 1914. A considerable proportion of the industrial and commercial news is now written to an end. The British press has also suffered greatly from the outbreak of social and nationalist rancour arising out of the great war, the inability of the European mind to grasp the Bolshevik issue, and the clumsy blunderings of the Versailles settlement. Quite half the news from Eastern Europe that appears in the London press is now deliberate fabrication, and a considerable proportion of the rest is rephrased and mutilated to give a misleading impression to the reader.

But people cannot be continuously deceived in this way, and the consequence of this press demoralization has been a great loss of influence for the daily paper. A diminishing number of people now believe the news as it is given them, and fewer still take the unsigned portions of the newspaper as written in good faith. And there has been a consequent enhancement of the importance of signed journalism. Men of manifest honesty, men with names to keep clean, have built up reputations and influence upon the ruins of editorial prestige. The exploitation of newspapers by the adventurers of "private enterprise" in business, has carried with it this immense depreciation in the power and honour of the newspaper.[Pg 189]

I am inclined to think that this swamping of a large part of the world's press by calculated falsehood and partisan propaganda is a temporary phase in the development of the print nexus: nevertheless, it is a very great inconvenience and danger to the world. It stands very much in the way of that universal adult education which is our present concern. Reality is horribly distorted. Men cannot see the world clearly and they cannot, therefore, begin to think about it rightly.

We need a much better and more trustworthy press than we possess. We cannot get on to a new and better world without it. The remedy is to be found not, I believe, in any sort of Government control, but in a legal campaign against the one thing harmful—the lie. It would be in the interests of most big advertisers, for most big advertisement is honest; it would be, in the long run, in the interests of the Press; and it would mean an enormous step forward in the general mental clarity of the world if a deliberate lie, whether in an advertisement or in the news or other columns of the press, was punishable—punishable whether it did or did not involve anything that is now an actionable damage. And it would still further strengthen the print nexus and clear the mind of the world if it were compulsory to correct untrue statements in the periodical press, whether they had been made in good faith or not, at least as conspicuously and lengthily as the original state[Pg 190]ment. I can see no impossibility in the realization of either of these proposals, and no objection that a really honest newspaper proprietor or advertiser could offer to them. It would make everyone careful, of course, but I fail to see any grievance in that. The sanitary effect upon the festering disputes of our time would be incalculably great. It would be like opening the windows upon a stuffy, overcrowded and unventilated room of disputing people.

Given adequate laws to prevent the cornering of paper or the partisan control of the means of distribution of books and printed matter, I believe that the present freedoms and the unhampered individualism of the world of thought, discussion and literary expression are and must remain conditions essential to the proper growth and activity of a common world mind. On the basis of that sounder education I have sketched in a preceding paper, there is possible such an extension of understanding, such an increase of intelligent co-operations and such a clarification of wills as to dissolve away half the difficulties and conflicts of the present time and to provide for the other half such a power of solution as we, in the heats, entanglements and limitations of our present ignorance, doubt and misinformation can scarcely begin to imagine.

I do not know how far I have conveyed to you in the last two papers my underlying idea of an education not merely intensive but extensive,[Pg 191] planned so economically and so ably as to reach every man and woman in the world.

It is a dream not of individuals educated—we have thought too much of the individual educated for the individual—but of a world educated to a pitch of understanding and co-operation far beyond anything we know of to-day, for the sake of all mankind.

I have tried to show that, given organization, given the will for it, such a world-wide education is possible.

I wish I had the gift of eloquence so that I could touch your wills in this matter. I do not know how this world of to-day strikes upon you. I am not ungrateful for the gift of life. While there is life and a human mind, it seems to me there must always be excitements and beauty, even if the excitements are fierce and the beauty terrible and tragic. Nevertheless, this world of mankind to-day seems to me to be a very sinister and dreadful world. It has come to this—that I open my newspaper every morning with a sinking heart, and usually I find little to console me. Every day there is a new tale of silly bloodshed. Every day I read of anger and hate, oppression and misery and want—stupid anger and oppression, needless misery and want—the insults and suspicions of ignorant men, and the inane and horrible self-satisfaction of the well-to-do. It is a vile world because it is an under-educated world, unreasonable, suspicious, base and ferocious. The air of our lives is a close and[Pg 192] wrathful air; it has the closeness of a prison—the indescribable offence of crowded and restricted humanity.

And yet I know that there is a way out.

Up certain steps there is a door to this dark prison of ignorance, prejudice and passion in which we live—and that door is only locked on the inside. It is within our power, given the will for it, given the courage for it—it is within our power to go out. The key to all our human disorder is organized education, comprehensive and universal. The watchword of conduct that will clear up all our difficulties is, the plain truth. Rely upon that watchword, use that key with courage and we can go out of the prison in which we live; we can go right out of the conditions of war, shortage, angry scrambling, mutual thwarting and malaise and disease in which we live; we and our kind can go out into sunlight, into a sweet air of understanding, into confident freedoms and a full creative life—for ever.

I do not know—I do not dare to believe—that I shall live to hear that key grating in the lock. It may be our children and our children's children will still be living in this jail. But a day will surely come when that door will open wide and all our race will pass out from this magic prison of ignorance, suspicion and indiscipline in which we now all suffer together.

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This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2010). The Salvaging of Civilization. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33889/33889-h/33889-h.htm

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