Mankind in the Making

by H. G. Wells

There is, however, a thing that was once done in schools as a convenient accomplishment, and which has—with that increase in communication which is the salient material fact of the nineteenth century—developed in Western Europe to the dimensions of a political necessity, and that is the teaching of one or more modern foreign languages. The language-teaching of all previous periods has been done with a view to culture, artistic, as in the case of Elizabethan Italian, or intellectual as with English Latin. But the language-teaching of to-day is deliberately, almost conscientiously, not for culture. It would, I am sure, be a very painful and shocking thought indeed to an English parent to think that French was taught in school with a view to reading French books. It is taught as a vulgar necessity for purposes of vulgar communication. The stirring together of the populations that is going on, the fashion and facilities for travel, the production of the radii from the trading foci, are rapidly making a commonplace knowledge of French, German, and Italian a necessity to the merchant and tradesman, and the ever more extensive travelling class. So that so far as Europe goes, one may very well regard this modern modern-language teaching as—with the modern mathematics—an extension of the trivium, of the apparatus, that is, of thought and expression. [Footnote: In the United States there is less sense of urgency about modern languages, but sooner or later the American may wake up to the need of Spanish in his educational schemes.] It is an extension and a very doubtful improvement. It is a modern necessity, a rather irksome necessity, of little or no essential educational value, an unavoidable duty the school will have to perform. [Footnote: In one way the foreign language may be made educationally very useful, and that is as an exercise in writing translations into good English.]

There are two subjects in the modern English school that stand by themselves and in contrast with anything one finds in the records of ancient and oriental schools, as a very integral part of what is regarded as our elementary general education. They are of very doubtful value in training the mind, and most of the matter taught is totally forgotten in adult life. These are history and geography. These two subjects constitute, with English grammar and arithmetic, the four obligatory subjects for the very lowest grade of the London College of Preceptors’ examinations, for example. The examination papers of this body reveal the history as an affair of dated events, a record of certain wars and battles, and legislative and social matters quite beyond the scope of a child’s experience and imagination. Scholastic history ends at 1700 or 1800, always long before it throws the faintest light upon modern political or social conditions. The geography is, for the most part, topography, with a smattering of quantitative facts, heights of mountains, for example, populations of countries, and lists of obsolete manufactures and obsolete trade conditions. Any one who will take the trouble to run through the text-books of these subjects gathered together in the library of the London Teachers’ Guild, will find that the history is generally taught without maps, pictures, descriptive passages, or anything to raise it above the level of an arid misuse of memory; and the highest levels to which ordinary school geography has attained are to be found in the little books of the late Professor Meiklejohn. These two subjects are essentially “information” subjects. They differ in prestige rather than in educational quality from school chemistry and natural history, and their development marks the beginning of that great accumulation of mere knowledge which is so distinctive of this present civilization.

There are, no doubt, many minor subjects, but this revision will at least serve to indicate the scope and chief varieties of school work. Out of some such miscellany it is that in most cases the student passes to specialization, to a different and narrower process which aims at a specific end, to the course of the College. In some cases this specialized course may be correlated with a real and present practice, as in the case of the musical, medical, and legal faculties of our universities; it may be correlated with obsolete needs and practices and regardless of modern requirements, as in the case of the student of divinity who takes his orders and comes into a world full of the ironical silences that follow great controversies, nakedly ignorant of geology, biology, psychology, and modern biblical criticism; or it may have no definite relation to special needs, and it may profess to be an upward prolongation of schooling towards a sort of general wisdom and culture, as in the case of the British “Arts” degrees. The ordinary Oxford, Cambridge, or London B.A. has a useless smattering of Greek, he cannot read Latin with any comfort, much less write or speak that tongue; he knows a few unedifying facts round and about the classical literature, he cannot speak or read French with any comfort; he has an imperfect knowledge of the English language, insufficient to write it clearly, and none of German, he has a queer, old-fashioned, and quite useless knowledge of certain rudimentary sections of mathematics, and an odd little bite out of history. He knows practically nothing of the world of thought embodied in English literature, and absolutely nothing of contemporary thought; he is totally ignorant of modern political or social science, and if he knows anything at all about evolutionary science and heredity it is probably matter picked up in a casual way from the magazines. Art is a sealed book to him. Still, the inapplicability of his higher education to any professional or practical need in the world is sufficiently obvious, it seems, to justify the claim that it has put him on a footing of thought and culture above the level of a shopman. It is either that or nothing. And without deciding between these alternatives, we may note here for our present purpose, that the conception of a general upward prolongation of schooling beyond adolescence, as distinguished from a specific upward prolongation into professional training, is necessary to the complete presentation of the school and college scheme in the modern state.

There has always been a tendency to utilize the gathering together of children in schools for purposes irrelevant to schooling proper, but of some real or fancied benefit. Wherever there is a priestly religion, the lower type of religious fanatic will always look to the schools as a means of doctrinal dissemination; will always be seeking to replace efficiency by orthodoxy upon staff and management; and, with an unconquerable, uncompromising persistency, will seek perpetually either to misconduct or undermine; and the struggle to get him out and keep him out of the school, and to hold the school against him, will be one of the most necessary and thankless of New Republican duties. I have, however, already adduced reasons that I think should appeal to every religious mind, for the exclusion of religious teaching from school work. The school gathering also affords opportunity for training in simple unifying political conceptions; the salutation of the flag, for example, or of the idealized effigies of King and Queen. The quality of these conceptions we shall discuss later. The school also gives scope for physical training and athletic exercises that are, under the crowded conditions of a modern town, almost impossible except by its intervention. And it would be the cheapest and easiest way of raising the military efficiency of a country, and an excellent thing for the moral tone and public order of a people, to impose upon the school gathering half an hour a day of vigorous military drill. The school, too, might very easily be linked more closely than it is at present with the public library, and made a means of book distribution; and its corridors may easily be utilized as a loan picture gallery, in which good reproductions of fine pictures might bring the silent influence of the artist mind to bear. But all these things are secondary applications of the school gathering; at their best they are not conducted by the school-teacher at all, and I remark upon them here merely to avoid any confusion their omission might occasion.

Now if we dip into this miscellany of things that figure and have figured in schools, if we turn them over and look at them, and seek to generalize about them, we shall begin to see that the most persistently present, and the living reality of it all, is this: to expand, to add to and organize and supplement that apparatus of understanding and expression the savage possesses in colloquial speech. The pressing business of the school is to widen the range of intercourse. [Footnote: This way of putting it may jar a little upon the more or less explicit preconceptions of many readers, who are in reality in harmony with the tone of thought of this paper. They will have decided that the school work is to “train the mind,” to “teach the pupil to think,” or upon some similar phrase. But I venture to think that most of these phrases are at once too wide and too narrow. They are too wide because they ignore the spontaneous activity of the child and the extra-scholastic forces of mind-training, and they are too narrow because they ignore the fact that we do not progress far with our thoughts unless we throw them out into objective existence by means of words, diagrams, models, trial essays. Even if we do not talk to others we must, silently or vocally or visibly, talk to ourselves at least to get on. To acquire the means of intercourse is to learn to think, so far as learning goes in the matter.] It is only secondarily—so far as schooling goes—or, at any rate, subsequently, that the idea of shaping, or, at least, helping to shape, the expanded natural man into a citizen, comes in. It is only as a subordinate necessity that the school is a vehicle for the inculcation of facts. The facts come into the school not for their own sake, but in relation to intercourse. It is only upon a common foundation of general knowledge that the initiated citizens of an educated community will be able to communicate freely together. With the net of this phrase, “widening the range of intercourse,” I think it is possible to gather together all that is essential in the deliberate purpose of schooling. Nothing that remains outside is of sufficient magnitude to be of any importance in the small-scale sketch of human development we are now making:—

If we take this and hold to it as a guide, and explore a scheme of school work, in the direction it takes us, we shall find it shaping itself (for an English-speaking citizen) something after this fashion:

A. Direct means of understanding and expression.
1. Reading.
2. Writing.
3. Pronouncing English correctly.
Which studies will expand into—
4. A thorough study of English as a culture language, its origin,
development, and vocabulary, and
5. A sound training in English prose composition and
versification.
And in addition—
6. Just as much of mathematics as one can get in.
7. Drawing and painting, not as “art,” but to train and develop
the appreciation of form and colour, and as a collateral
means of expression.
8. Music [perhaps] to the same end.
B. To speak the ordinary speech, read with fair intelligence,
and write in a passably intelligible manner the foreign language
or languages, the social, political, and intellectual necessities
of the time require.
And C. A division arising out of A and expanding in the later
stages of the school course to continue and replace A: the
acquisition of the knowledge (and of the art of acquiring
further knowledge from books and facts) necessary to participate
in contemporary thought and life.

Now this project is at once more modest in form and more ambitious in substance than almost any school scheme or prospectus the reader is likely to encounter. Let us (on the assumption of our opening paragraph) inquire what is needed to carry it into execution. So far as 1 and 2 in this table go, we have to recognize that since the development of elementary schools in England introduced a spirit of endeavour into teaching, there has been a steady progress in the art of education. Reading and writing are taught somehow or other to most people nowadays, they are frequently taught quickly and well, especially well, I think, in view of the raw material, in many urban Board Schools in England, and there is nothing to do here but to inquire if anything can be done to make this teaching, which is so exceptional in attaining its goal, still quicker and easier, and in bringing the average up to the level of the present best. We have already suggested as the work of an imaginary English Language Society, how much might be done in providing everywhere, cheaply and unavoidably, the best possible reading-books, and it is manifest that the standard of copy-books for writing might also be pressed upward by similar methods. In addition, we have to consider—what is to me a most uncongenial subject—the possible rationalization of English spelling. I will frankly confess I know English as much by sight as by sound, and that any extensive or striking alteration, indeed that almost any alteration, in the printed appearance of English, worries me extremely. Even such little things as Mr. Bernard Shaw’s weakness for printing “I’ve” as “Ive,” and the American “favor,” “thro,” and “catalog” catch at my attention as it travels along the lane of meaning, like trailing briars. But I have to admit this habit of the old spelling, which I am sure most people over four-and-twenty share with me, will trouble neither me nor any one else who reads books now, in the year 1990. I have to admit that the thing is an accident of my circumstances. I have learnt to read and write in a certain way, and I am concerned with the thing said and not with the vehicle, and so it is that it distresses me when the medium behaves in an unusual way and distracts my attention from the thing it conveys. But if it is true—and I think it must be true—that the extremely arbitrary spelling of English—and more especially of the more familiar English words—greatly increases the trouble of learning to read and write, I do not think the mental comfort of one or two generations of grown-up people must be allowed to stand in the way of a permanent economy in the educational process. I believe even that such a reader as I might come to be very easy in the new way. But whatever is done must be done widely, simultaneously, all over the English-speaking community, and after the fullest consideration. The local “spelling reform” of a few half-educated faddists here and there, helps not at all, is a mere nuisance. This is a thing to be worked out in a scientific way by the students of phonetics; they must have a complete alphabet settled for good, a dictionary ready, reading-books well tested, the whole system polished and near perfection before the thing passes out of the specialists’ hands. The really practical spelling-reformer will devote his guineas to endowing chairs of phonetics and supporting publication in phonetic science, and his time to study and open-minded discussion. Such organisations as the Association Phonétique Internationale, may be instanced. Systems concocted in a hurry, in a half-commercial or wholly commercial and in a wholly presumptuous manner, pushed like religious panaceas and advertised like soap—Pitman’s System, Barnum’s System, Quackbosh the Gifted Postman’s System, and all that sort of thing—do nothing but vulgarize, discredit, and retard this work.

Before a system of phonetic spelling can be established, it is advisable that a standard pronunciation of English should exist. With that question also these papers have already dealt. But for the sake of emphasis I would repeat here the astonishment that has grown upon me as I have given my mind to these things, that, save for local exceptions, there should be no pressure even upon those who desire to become teachers in our schools or preachers in our pulpits, to attain a qualifying minimum of correct pronunciation.

Now directly we pass beyond these first three elementary matters, reading, writing, and pronunciation, and come to the fourth and fifth items of our scheme, to the complete mastery of English that is, we come upon a difficulty that is all too completely disregarded in educational discussions—always by those who have had no real scholastic experience, and often by those who ought to know better. It is extremely easy for a political speaker or a city magnate or a military reformer or an irresponsible writer, to proclaim that the schoolmaster must mend his ways forthwith, give up this pointless Latin of his, and teach his pupils the English language “thoroughly”—with much emphasis on the “thoroughly,” but it is quite another thing for the schoolmaster to obey our magnificent directions. For the plain, simple, insurmountable fact is this, that no one knows how to teach English as in our vague way we critics imagine it taught; that no working schoolmaster alive can possibly give the thing the concentrated attention, the experimental years necessary for its development, that it is worth nobody’s while, and that (except in a vein of exalted self-sacrifice) it will probably not be worth any one’s while to do so for many years unless some New Republicans conspire to make it so. The teaching of English requires its Sturm, its energetic modern renascence schoolmasters, its set of school books, its branches and grades, before it can become a discipline, even to compare with the only subject taught with any shadow of orderly progressive thoroughness in secondary schools, namely, Latin. At present our method in English is a foolish caricature of the Latin method; we spend a certain amount of time teaching children classificatory bosh about the eight sorts of Nominative Case, a certain amount of time teaching them the “derivation” of words they do not understand, glance shyly at Anglo-Saxon and at Grimm’s Law, indulge in a specific reminiscence of the Latin method called parsing, supplement with a more modern development called the analysis of sentences, give a course of exercises in paraphrasing (for the most part the conversion of good English into bad), and wind up with lessons in “Composition” that must be seen to be believed. Essays are produced, and the teacher noses blindly through the product for false concords, prepositions at the end of sentences, and, if a person of peculiarly fine literary quality, for the word “reliable” and the split infinitive. These various exercises are so little parts of an articulate whole that they may be taken in almost any order and any relative quantity. And in the result, if some pupil should, by a happy knack of apprehension, win through this confusion to a sense of literary quality, to the enterprise of even trying to write, the thing is so rare and wonderful that almost inevitably he or she, in a fine outburst of discovered genius, takes to the literary life. For the rest, they will understand nothing but the flattest prose; they will be deaf to everything but the crudest meanings; they will be the easy victims of the boom, and terribly shy of a pen. They will revere the dead Great and respect the new Academic, read the living quack, miss and neglect the living promise, and become just a fresh volume of that atmosphere of azote, in which our literature stifles.