Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

How far off that seemed now, and how vivid still! He could remember Dolly’s shadow on the rough-cast wall, and the very things he had said in reply. He had talked like a fool about the wonderful future of Peter—and of the world. How long was that ago? Five-and-twenty years? (Yes, Peter would be five-and-twenty in June.) How safe and secure the European world had seemed then! It seemed to be loitering, lazily and basely indeed, but certainly, towards a sort of materialist’s millennium. And what a vast sham its security had been! He had called Peter the “Heir of the Ages.” And the Heritage of the Ages had been preparing even then to take Peter away from the work he had chosen and from all the sunshine and leisure of his life and to splinter his shoulder-blade, smash his wrist, snap his leg-bones with machine-gun bullets, and fling him aside, a hobbling, stiff, broken young man to limp through the rest of life....

§ 2

That was what his mind had to lay hold of, that was what he had to talk about, this process that had held out such fair hopes for Peter and had in the end crippled him and come near to killing him and wasting him altogether. He had to talk of that, of an enormous collapse and breach of faith with the young. The world which had seemed to be the glowing promise of an unprecedented education and upbringing for Peter and his generation, the world that had been, so to speak, joint guardian with himself, had defaulted. This war was an outrage by the senior things in the world upon all the hope of the future; it was the parent sending his sons through the fires to Moloch, it was the guardian gone mad, it was the lapse of all educational responsibility.

He had to keep his grasp upon that idea. By holding to that he could get away from his morbidly intense wish to be personal and intimate with these two. He loved them and they loved him, but what he wanted to say was something quite beyond that.

What he had to talk about was Education, and Education alone. He had to point out to them that their own education had been truncated, was rough ended and partial. He had to explain why that was so. And he had to show that all this vast disaster to the world was no more and no less than an educational failure. The churches and teachers and political forms had been insufficient and wrong; they had failed to establish ideas strong and complete enough and right enough to hold the wills of men. Necessarily he had to make a dissertation upon the war. To talk of life now was to talk of the war. The war now was human life. It had eaten up all free and independent living.

The war was an educational breakdown, that was his point; and in education lay whatever hope there was for mankind. He had to say that to them, and he had to point out how that idea must determine the form of their lives. He had to show the political and social and moral conclusions involved in it. And he had to say what he wanted to say in a large manner. He had to keep his temper while he said it.

Oswald, limping slowly up and down his lawn in the April sunshine, with a gnawing pain at his knee, had to underline, as it were, that last proviso in his thoughts. That was the extreme difficulty of these urgent and tragic times. The world was in a phase of intense, but swift, tumultuous, and distracting tragedy. The millions were not suffering and dying in stateliness and splendour but in a vast uproar, amidst mud, confusion, bickering, and incoherence indescribable. While it was manifest that only great thinking, only very clear and deliberate thinking, could give even the forms of action that would arrest the conflagration, it was nevertheless almost impossible for any one anywhere to think clearly and deliberately, so universal and various were the compulsions, confusions, and distresses of the time. And even the effect to see and state the issue largely, fevered Oswald’s brain. He grew angry with the multitudinous things that robbed him of his serenity.

“Education,” he said, as if he called for help; “education.”

And then, collapsing into wrath: “A land of uneducated blockheads!”

No! It was not one of his good mornings. In a little while his steps had quickened and his face had flushed. His hands clenched in his pockets. “A universal dulness of mind,” he whispered. “Obstinacy.... Inadaptability.... Unintelligent opposition.”