"The present university turns out men who are neither practical nor theoretical. I want a university that will turn out thinkers. The men who have done most to stimulate thought these past few years are men like Wells and Shaw and Chesterton; and I don't think that one of them is a 'varsity man.'"
"You can't run a world on thought," said he.
"I don't know," I said, "we seem to run this old State of ours without thought. The truth is that there will always be more workers than thinkers. While one chap is planning a new heaven on earth, the other ninety-nine are working hard at motors and benches.
"H. G. Wells is always asking for better technical schools, more research, more invention. All these are absolutely necessary, but I want more than that; along with science and art I want the thinking part of education to go on."
"It goes on now."
"No," I said, "it doesn't. Your so-called educated man is often a stupid fellow. Doctors have a good specialist education, yet I know a score of doctors who think that Socialism means 'The Great Divide.' When Osteopathy came over from America a few years ago thousands of medical men pronounced it 'damned quackery' at once; only a few were wide enough to study the thing to see what it was worth. So with inoculation; the doctors follow the antitoxin authority like sheep. At the university I once saw a raid on an Anti-Vivisection shop, and I'm sure that not one medical student in the crowd had ever thought about vivisection. Mention Women's Freedom to the average lawyer, and he will think you a madman.
"Don't you see what I am driving at? I want first-class doctors and engineers and chemists, but I want them to think also, to think about things outside their immediate interests. This is the age of the specialist. That's what's wrong with it. Somebody, Matthew Arnold, I think, wanted a man who knew everything of something and something of everything. It's a jolly good definition of education."
"That is the idea of the Scotch Code," said Lawson.
"Yes, perhaps it is. They want our bairns to learn tons of somethings about everything that doesn't matter a damn in life."
* * *