WHAT SHOULD PEOPLE HOW?

Waikato Times, Volume 122, Issue 20492, 7 May 1938, Page 15 (Supplement)

WHAT SHOULD PEOPLE HOW?

(Address Before the British Association.)

WHAT ARE WE TELLING young people directly about the world in which they are to live? What is the world picture we are presenting to their minds? What is the framework of conceptions about reality and about obligation into which the rest of their mental existences will have to be fitted*? We live under conditions where it seems we are still only able to afford for the majority of our young people freedom from economic exploitation, teachers even of the cheapest sort and some educational equipment, up to the age of 14 or 15, and we have to fit our projects to that. Roughly, we have to get it into ten years at the outside. And next let us turn to another relentlessly inelastic packing-case and that is, the school time-table. How many hours in the week have we got for this job in hand? The maximum school hours we have available are something round about thirty, but out of this we have to take time for what I may call the Non-informative Teaching, the native and foreign language teaching, teaching to read, teaching to write clearly, basic mathematical work, drawing, various forms of manual training, music, and so forth. I doubt if at the most generous estimate we can apportion more than six hours a week to essentially informative work. Then let us, still erring on the side of generosity, assume that there are 40 weeks of schooling in the year. This gives a maximum of 240 hours in the year. If we take ten years of schooling as an average human being's preparation for life, and if we disregard the ravages made upon our school time by measles, chicken-pox, whooping cough, coronations and occasions of public rejoicing, we are given 2400 hours as all that we can hope for as our time allowance for building up a coherent picture of the world, the essential foundation of knowledge and ideas, in the minds of our people. The complete framework of knowledge has to be established in two hundred dozen hours. It is plain that a considerable austerity is indicated for us. Our question becomes therefore: ' What should people know—whatever else they don’t know ? Whatever else we may leave over —for leisure-time reading, for being picked up or studied afterwards—what is the irreducible minimum that we ought to teach as clearly, stronglv and conclusively as we know’ how’.” We begin by telling true stories of the past and of other lands. We open out the child’s mind to a realisation that the sort of life it is living is not the only life that has been lived and that human life in the past has been different from what it is to-day, and on the whole that it has been progressive. We shall have to teach a little about law and robbers, kings and conquests, but I see no need at this stage to afflict the growing mind with dates and dynastic particulars. I hope the time is not far distant when children even of eight or nine will be freed from the persuasion that history is a magic recital beginning “ William the Conquerer, 1066.” I do not see either the charm or the educational benefit of making W important subject of criminal history of rovalty, the murder of the Princes in the Towel-, the wives of Henrv the Eighth, the families of Edw’ard and James I, the mistresses of Charles 11, Sweet Nell of Old Drury, and all the rest of it. I suggest that the sooner we Get All That Unpleasant Stuff out of schools, and the sooner that we forget the border bickerings of England, France, Scotland. Ireland, and Wales, Bannockburn, Flodden, Crecy and Agincourt, the nearer our world will be to a sane outlook upon life, I believe that the crazy combative patriotism that plainly threatens to destroy civilisation to-day is very largely begotten by the schoolmaster and the fechodlmistresses in their history lessons. They take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and they inflame and fix its barbarism. I think we underrate the formative effect of this perpetual reiteration of howr we won, how our Empire grew and how relatively splendid we have been in every department of life. We are blinded by habit and custom to the way it infects these growing minds with the chronic and nearly incurable disease of national egotism. Equally mischievous is the furtive anti-patriotism of the leftish teacher. Archaeologists have been piecing together a record of the growth of the primary civilisations and the developing roles of priest, king, farmer, warrior, the succession of stone and copper and iron, the appearance of horse and road and shipping in the expansions of those primordiail communities. It is a far finer story to tell a boy or girl, and there is no reason why it should not be told. Swinging down upon these early civilisations came first the Semitic-speakin g peoples and then the Aryan-speakers. Persian, Macedonian, Roman followed one another, Christendom inherited from Rome and Islam from Persia, and the world began to assume the shapes we know to-day. This is a great history, and also in its broad lines it is a simple history—upon it we can Base a Lively Modern Intelligence, and now it can be put in a form just as comprehensible and exciting for the school phase as the story of our English kings and their terrestrial, dynastic and sexual entanglements. When at last we focus our attention on the British Isles and France we shall have the affairs of these regions in a proper proportion to the rest of the human adventure. And our young people will be thinking less like gossiping court pages and more like horse-riders, seamen, artist-artisans, road-makers and city builders, which I take it is what in spirit we want them to be. There is a lot more we have to put into the heads of our young people over and above History. What is needed most are reasonable precise ideas of the various types of country and the distinctive floras and faunas of the main regions of the world. We do not want our budding citizens to chant lists of capes and rivers, but we do want them to have a real picture in their minds of the Amazon forests, the pampas, the various phases in the course of the Nile, the landscape of Labrador and so on, and also we want something like a realisation of the sort of human life that is led in these regions. We have enormous resources now in cheap photo-

MR H. G. WELLS AND EDUCATION

graphy, in films and so forth, that even our fathers never dreamt of—to make all this vivid and real. New methods are needed to handle these new instruments, but they need not be overwhelmingly costly. And also our new citizen should know enough of topography to realise why London and Rio and New York and Rome and Suez happen to be where they are and what sort of places they are. Geography reaches over to Biology. Here again our Schools Lag Some Fifty Years Behind contemporary knowledge. The past half-century. has written a fascinating history of the succession of living things in time and made plain all sorts of processes in the prosperity, decline, extinction and replacement of species. We can sketch the wonderful and inspiring story of life now from its beginning. Moreover, we have a continually more definite account of the sequence of subman in the world and the gradual emergence of our kind. This is elementary, essential, interesting and stimulating stuff; and it is impossible to consider anyone a satisfactory citizen who is still ignorant of that great story. We have the science of inanimate matter. In a world of machinery, optical instruments, electricity, radio and so forth we want to lay a sound foundation of pure physics and chemistry upon the most modern lines—for everyone. And finally, to meet awakening curiosity and take the morbidity out of it, we have to tell our young people and especially our young townspeople, about the working of their bodies, about reproduction and about the chief diseases, enfeeblements and accidents that lie in wait for them in the world. For the next five-and-twenty years now the ordinary man all over* the earth will be continually confronted with systems of ideas. They are complicated systems with many implications and applications. Indeed they areaspects of life rather than systems of ideas. But we send out our young people absolutely unprepared for the heated and biased interpretations they will encounter. We hush it up until they are in the thick of it. The most the poor silly young things seem able to make of it is to be violently and self-righteously Antisomething or other. Anti-Red, Anti-Capitalist, AntiFascist. The more ignorant you are the easier it is to be Anti. To hate something without having anything substantial to put against it. A special sub-section of history in this grade should be a course in the history of War, which is always written and talked about by the unwary as though it had always been the same, while as a matter of fact—except for its violence—it has changed profoundly with every change in social, political and economic life.

Clearly parallel to this history our young people need now a more detailed and explicit acquaintance with world geography, with the different types of population in the world and the developed and undeveloped resources of the globe. The devastation of the world’s forests, the replacement of pasture by sand deserts through haphazard cultivation, the waste and exhaustion of natural resources, coal, petrol, water, that is now going on, the massacre of important animals, whales, penguins, seals, food fish, should be matters of Universal Knowledge and Concern. Then our new citizens should be given an account of the present phase of communication and trade, of production and invention, and above all they need whatever plain knowledge is available about the conventions of property and money. Upon these conventions human property stands, and the efficiency of their working is entirely dependent upon the general state of mind throughout the world. We know now that what used to be called the inexorable laws of political economy and the laws of monetary science are really no more than rash generalisations about human behaviour, supported by a maximum of pompous verbiage and a minimum of scientific observation. Most of our young people come on to adult life, to employment, business and the rest of it, blankly ignorant even of the way in which money has changed slavery and serfdom into wages employment and how its fluctuations in value make the industrials windmills spin or flag. They are not even warned of the significance of such words as inflation or deflation, and the wage earners are the helpless prey at every turn towards prosperity of the savings-snatching financier. Any plausible monetary charlatan can secure their ignorant votes. They know no better. They cannot help themselves. Yet the subject of property and money—together they make one subject because money is only the fluid form of property—is scarcely touched upon in any stage in the education of any class in our community. . . . By adolescence the time has arrive for general ideas about one’s personal relationship to ihe universe to be faced. The primary propositions of the chief religious and philosophical interpretations of the world should be put as plainly and impartially as possible before our young people. They will be asking those perennial questions of adolescence—whence and why and whither. They will have to face, almost at once, the heated and exciting propagandas of theological and sceptical partisans—pro’s and anti’s. As far as possible we ought to provide a ring of clear knowledge for these inevitable fights. And also, as the more practical aspect of the question: “ What Am I To Do With My Life? ” I think we ought to link with our general study of social structure a study of social types which will direct attention to the choice of a metier. In what spirit will you face the world and what sort of job do you feel like? This subject of Personal Sociology as it is projected here is the school equivalent of a confirmation class. It says to everyone: “ There are the conditions under which you face your world.” The response to these questions, the determination of the will, is, however, not within our present scope. That is a matter for the religious teacher, for intimate friends and for the inner impulses of the individual. But our children must have the facts. Thus I budget, so to speak, for our 2400 hours of informative teaching.