Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

Blepp shrugged his shoulders and looked for sympathy at the twisted brick chimneys of St. Giles’.

Oswald became jerkily eloquent. “We’ve got an empire sprawling all over the world. We’re a people at grips with all mankind. And in a few years these few thousand men here and at Cambridge and a few thousand in the other universities, have practically to be the mind of the empire. Think of the problems that press upon us as an empire. All the nations sharpen themselves now like knives. Are we making the mentality to solve the Irish riddle here? Are we preparing any outlook for India here? What are you doing here to get ready for such tasks as these?”

“How can I show you the realities that go on beneath the surface?” said Blepp. “You don’t see what is brewing today, the talk that goes on in the men’s rooms, the mutual polishing of minds. Look not at our formal life but our informal life. Consider one college, consider for example Balliol. Think of the Jowett influence, the Milner group—not blind to the empire there, were we? Even that fellow Belloc. A saucy rogue, but good rich stuff. All out of just one college. These are things one cannot put in a syllabus. These are things that defeat statistics.”

“But that is no reason why you should put chaff and dry bones into the syllabus,” said Oswald....

“This place,” said Oswald, and waved his arm at the great serenity of St. Giles’, “it has the air of a cathedral close. It might be a beautiful place of retirement for sad and weary old men. It seems a thousand miles from machinery, from great towns and the work of the world.”

“Would you have us teach in a foundry?”

“I’d have you teaching something about the storm that seems to me to be gathering in the world of labour. These youngsters here are going to be the statesmen, the writers and teachers, the lawyers, the high officials, the big employers, of tomorrow. But all that world of industry they have to control seems as far off here as if it were on another planet. You’re not talking about it, you’re not thinking about it. You’re teaching about the Gracchi and the Greek fig trade. You’re magnifying that pompous bore Cicero and minimizing—old Salisbury for example—who was a far more important figure in history—a greater man in a greater world.”

“With all respect to his memory,” said Blepp, “but good Lord!”

“Much greater. Your classics put out your perspective. Dozens of living statesmen are greater than Cicero. Of course our moderns are greater. If only because of the greatness of our horizons. Oxford and Cambridge ought to be the learning and thinking part of the whole empire, twin hemispheres in the imperial brain. But when I think of the size of the imperial body, its hundreds of nations, its thousands of cities, its tribes, its vast extension round and about the world, the immense problem of it, and then of the size and quality of this, I’m reminded of the Atlantosaurus. You’ve heard of the beast? Its brain was smaller than the ganglia of its rump. No doubt its brain thought itself quite up to its job. It wasn’t. Something ate up the Atlantosaurus. These two places, this place, ought to be big enough, and bigly conceived enough, to irradiate our whole world with ideas. All the empire. They ought to dominate the minds of hundreds of millions of men. And they dominate nothing. Leave India and Africa out of it. They do not even dominate England. Think only of your labour at home, of that huge blind Titan, whom you won’t understand, which doesn’t understand you——”

“There again,” interrupted Blepp sharply, “you are simply ignorant of what is going on here. Because Oxford has a certain traditional beauty and a decent respect for the past, because it doesn’t pose and assert itself rawly, you are offended. You do not realize how active we can be, how up-to-date we are. It wouldn’t make us more modern in spirit if we lived in enamelled bathrooms and lectured in corrugated iron sheds. That isn’t modernity. That’s your mistake. In respect to this very question of labour, we have got our labour contact. Have you never heard of Ruskin College? Founded here by an American of the most modern type, one Vrooman.” He repeated the name “Vrooman,” not as though he loved it but as though he thought it ought to appeal to Oswald. “I think he came from Chicago.” Surely a Teutonic name from Chicago was modern enough to satisfy any one! “It is a college of real working-men, of the Trade Union leader type, the actual horny-handed article, who come up here—I suppose because they don’t agree with your idea that we deal only in the swathings of mummies. They at any rate think that we have something to tell the modern world, something worth their learning. Perhaps they know their needs better than you do.”