Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

Oswald picked up his thread again after a long, half dreaming excursion in Frazer-land.

“It is just this limitlessness, this potential immortality of States that makes all the confusion and bloodshed of history. What is happening in the world today? What is the essence of it all? The communities of today are developing range, faster than ever they did: aeroplanes, guns, swifter ships, everywhere an increasing range of action. That is the most important fact to grasp about the modern world. It is the key fact in politics. From the first dawn of the human story you see man in a kind of a puzzled way—how shall I put it?—pursuing the boundary of his possible community. Which always recedes. Which recedes now faster than ever. Until it brings him to a fatal war and disaster. Over and over again it is the same story. If you had a coloured historical atlas of the world, the maps would be just a series of great dabs of empire, spreading, spreading—coming against resistances—collapsing. Each dab tries to devour the world and fails. There is no natural limit to a human community, no limit in time or space—except one.

“Genus Homo, species Sapiens, Mankind, that is the only limit.” (Peter, perhaps, might be led up to saying that.)...

“What has the history of education always been? A series of little teaching chaps trying to follow up and fix the fluctuating boundaries of communities”—an image came into Oswald’s head that pleased him and led him on—“like an insufficient supply of upholsterers trying to overtake and tack down a carpet that was blowing away in front of a gale. An insufficient supply of upholsterers.... And the carpet always growing as it blows. That’s good.... They were trying to fix something they hadn’t clearly defined. And you have a lot of them still hammering away at their tacks when the edge of the carpet has gone on far ahead.... That was really the state of education in England when I took you two young people in hand; the carpet was in the air and most of the schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, writers, teachers, journalists, and all who build up and confirm ideas were hammering in tacks where the carpet had been resting the day before yesterday.... But a lot were not even hammering. No. They just went easy. Yes, that is what I mean when I say that education was altogether at loose ends.... But Germany was different; Germany was teaching and teaching in schools, colleges, press, everywhere, this new Imperialism of hers, a sort of patriotic melodrama, with Britain as Carthage and Berlin instead of Rome. They pointed the whole population to that end. They taught this war. All over the world a thousand other educational systems pointed in a thousand directions....

“So Germany set fire to the Phœnix....

“Only one other great country had any sort of state education. Real state education that is. The United States was also teaching citizenship, on a broader if shallower basis; a wider citizenship—goodwill to all mankind. Shallower. Shallower certainly. But it was there. A republican culture. Candour ... generosity.... The world has still to realize its debt to the common schools of America....

“This League of Free Nations, of which all men are dreaming and talking, this World Republic, is the rediscovered outline, the proper teaching of all real education, the necessary outline now of human life.... There is nothing else to do, nothing else that people of our sort can do at all, nothing but baseness, grossness, vileness, and slavery unless we live now as a part of that process of a world peace. Our lives have got to be political lives. All lives have to be made political lives. We can’t run about loose any more. This idea of a world-wide commonwealth, this ideal of an everlasting world-peace in which we are to live and move and have our being, has to be built up in every school, in every mind, in every lesson. ‘You belong. You belong. And the world belongs to you.’...”

What ought one to teach when one teaches geography, for instance, but the common estate of mankind? Here, the teacher should say, are mountains and beautiful cities you may live to see. Here are plains where we might grow half the food of mankind! Here are the highways of our common life, and here are pleasant bye-ways where you may go! All this is your inheritance. Your estate. To rejoice in—and serve. But is that how geography is taught?...

“We used to learn lists of the British possessions, with their total exports and imports in money. I remember it as if it were yesterday.... Old Smugs—a hot New Imperialist—new then....

“Then what is history but a long struggle of men to find peace and safety, and how they have been prevented by baseness and greed and folly? Is that right? No, folly and baseness—and hate.... Hate certainly.... All history is one dramatic story, of man blundering his way from the lonely ape to the world commonwealth. All history is each man’s adventure. But what teacher makes history much more than a dwarfish twaddle about boundaries and kings and wars? Dwarfish twaddle. History! It went nowhere. It did nothing. Was there ever anything more like a crowd of people getting into an omnibus without wheels than the History Schools at Oxford? Or your History Tripos?”... Oswald repeated his image and saw that it was good....