It is only by this reorganization of schooling upon the lines of big production that we can hope to get a civilized community in the world at an educational level very markedly higher than the existing educational level.
But if we could so economize teaching energy—if we made our really great teachers, by the use of modern appliances, teachers not of handfuls but of millions; if we insisted upon a universal application of the best and most effective methods of teaching, just as we insist upon the best and most effective methods of street traction and town lighting—then I believe it would be possible to build the civilization of the years to come on a foundation of mental preparation incomparably sounder and higher than anything we know of to-day.
VII
COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK
And now let us go on to the next stages of education.
The schooling process is a natural phase in human development—it is our elaboration of the natural learning of boyhood and girlhood and of adolescence. There was schooling before schools; there was schooling before humanity. I have watched a cat schooling her kittens. Schooling is a part of being young. And we grow up. So there comes a time when schooling is over, when the process of equipment gives place to an increasing share in the activities and decisions of adult life.
Nevertheless for us education must still go on.
I suppose that the savage or the barbarian or the peasant in any part of the world or the uneducated man anywhere would laugh if you told him that the adult must still learn. But in our modern world—I mean the more or less civilized world of the last twenty-five centuries or so—there has grown up a new idea—new, I mean, in the sense that it runs counter to the life scheme of primitive humanity and of most other living things—and that is the idea that one can go on learning right up to the end of life. It marks off modern man from all animals, that in his adult life he can display a sense that there remains something still to be investigated and wisdom still to be acquired.