The Salvaging of Civilization

by H. G. Wells

I do not know enough history to tell you with any confidence when adult men, instead of just going about the business of life after they had grown up, continued to devote themselves to learning, to a deliberate prolongation of what is for all other animals an adolescent phase. But by the time of Buddha in India and Confucius in China and the schools of the philosophers in the Greek world the thing was in full progress. That was twenty-six centuries ago or more.

Something of the sort may have been going on in the temples of Egypt or Samaria a score of centuries before. I do not know. You must ask some such great authority as Professor Breasted about that. It may be fifty or a hundred centuries since men, although they were fully grown up, still went on trying to learn.

The idea of adult learning has spread ever since. To-day I suppose most educated people would agree that so long as we live we learn and ought to learn—that we ought to develop our ideas and enlarge, correct and change our ideas.

But even to-day you will find people who have not yet acquired this view. You will find even teachers and doctors and business men who are persuaded that they had learnt all that there was to learn by twenty-five or thirty. It is only quite recently that this idea has passed beyond a special class and pervaded the world generally—the idea of everyone being a life-long student and of the whole world becoming, as it were, a university for those who have passed beyond the schooling stage.

It has spread recently because in recent years the world has changed so rapidly that the idea of settling down for life has passed out of our minds, has given place to a new realization of the need of continuous adaptation to the very end of our days. It is no good settling down in a world that, on its part, refuses to do anything of the sort.

But hitherto, before these new ideas began to spread in our community, the mass of men and women definitely settled down. At twelve, or fifteen, or sixteen, or twenty it was decided that they should stop learning. It has only been a rare and exceptional class hitherto that has gone on learning throughout life. The scene and field of that learning hitherto has been, in our Western communities, the University. Essentially the University is and has been an organization of adult learning as distinguished from preparatory and adolescent learning.

But between the phase of schooling and the phase of adult learning there is an intermediate stage.

In Scotland and America that is distinguished and thought of clearly as the college stage. But in England, where we do not think so clearly, this college stage is mixed up with and done partly at school and partly in the University. It is not marked off so definitely from the stage of general preparation that precedes it or from the stage of free intellectual enterprise that follows it.

Now what should college give the young citizen, male or female, upon the foundation of schooling we have already sketched out? In practice we find a good deal of technical study comes into the college stage. The budding lawyer begins to read law, the doctor starts his professional studies, the future engineer becomes technical, and the young merchant sets to work, or should do, to study the great movements of commerce and business method and organization.

As the college stage of those who do not, as a matter of fact, go to college, we have now in every civilized country the evening continuation school, the evening technical school and the works school.