The Story of a Great Schoolmaster

by H. G. Wells

'Here is full scope for a large number of boys of all ages to be engaged in research. It is all of a co-operative character. They can study the various social and economic systems—from co-partnership to syndicalism; or the Liberation of Slaves; or the League of Nations; or the Liberation of Italy.

'Another block will be a science block with an engineering laboratory, machinery hall, physical, chemical, and biological laboratories—well supplied with apparatus and plant for applied science; plant, too, to lead to the investigations of the day; testing machine, ship tank, air tunnel; a miniature standardising laboratory; and with this a botanical garden and an experimental farm.

'Another would be an art-room, music-room, theatre, a home of industry for studying industrial development and industrial life.

'This is not a Utopian scheme, but one within possibility in town and country. To each large central high school should be associated groups of elementary schools, and there should be free highways between them, neither barred by examinations nor barred by expense....

'Another change must also come. Books on modern problems, strangely enough, are not yet read in schools. For example, the time is overdue for a change in the English books: Burke's Reflections and Pitt's War Speeches, or Addison, to Ruskin's Unto This Last and Time and Tide, or to Bernard Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, and the modern poets. Some would go so far as to give Shakespeare a rest. It is astonishing how the newer books bearing on the large questions of the day, and bearing on the actual life of the boy, strike the imagination of boys—even quite young boys of the upper elementary school age. They stir up the faculties and appeal to a less used kind of imagination. It is surprising, too, what open and live views young boys will reach. And one thing the study of these books possesses, which I hope to dwell upon later, is that they bring the schools into close touch with the everyday life of their homes and of the community.

'Creative education demands that schools should be brought into harmony with the community life, and should take part in the industrial and economic life. When boys and girls go home from school (even to the humblest home) the parents should find there is something their children have done at school which will help them in their work. This means that technical and vocational training should hold a prominent, and not a subsidiary, place in the schools. It is not difficult to see that this kind of work contains within it the spirit and genius of Science. We claim that education should be turned in this direction, with confidence and inspiration. The divorce of industrial life from the life of the spirit is one of the tragedies of the age. It produces calamitous results. A man's work may be of an impossible kind, it may be sordid and destructive of life—and the cure proposed is that he should have shorter hours and more pay. This leads to bad diagnosis of the cause of the Labour difficulty, and prevents necessary reforms in the industries....

'Creativeness, the co-operative spirit and method, the vision, the experimental method of searching for the truth, form the unique gift Science and Industry have to give to the "New Education." Under the influence of this new outlook all other departments of knowledge must be restudied. Under its influence the life of school will become active, the workers self-reliant, love abounding. It will make good craftsmen and make the school of use in the community—whether in the manufacturing life or in the investigation of economic conditions. Incidentally it will give rise to a new body of men capable of going wholly or in part to teaching, and the school will be thus linked up with the life of the place.

'It may be well to state that with an education of this kind based fundamentally on Science a capable boy will leave a secondary school with a good knowledge of Science and of its application, with a research attitude towards history and modern problems, and with a good working knowledge of two, or three, or even four languages....

'The study of social questions is seriously needed. Industries would then have a close connection with the boys and girls, and yet boys and girls would be free to follow the best of their own talents and inclinations—the industrial life would not be separated from the spiritual life; and we may hope that some part of this ideal would pass over into the workshops and factories; so that the labourer would learn to love his work better than his wage—for so indeed he would wish to do. And the faculties of the worker would grow. The method of the work would follow the method of the school, as it is doing more and more in our own land and in many a workshop. For the spirit is with these ideals; the practice difficult for any single firm to carry out. Hence is the need for radical change in schools. Firms are being driven to start trade schools of their own, when they would prefer the work to be done with all the wider scope of a school. And the same enlightened firms endeavour to "promote" their men.

'And here we come to what is probably the natural source of all labour "unrest"—the unstretched faculties of the worker. Men there are in any great shops who have intellectual faculties of the highest order, and these faculties are not used, so the greatest possession a man has, and the greatest his country has—the "faculties" of its owners—is allowed to dissipate. And in the feeling of the mental want of equilibrium, in the slow frittering away of life, there arrives the turbulent spirit. The study of these questions is the problem for our coming international university. The industrial and economic problems involved can only be approached under international agreement. All that has been possible at present in the way of making industrial life pure and holy is by legislative restrictions, often enough rankling to the worker even when needed for his amelioration. Such legislation (Factory Acts, Insurance Acts, wages, hours) does not remove the source of the disease; at best it only mitigates the worst results. More drastic changes may be needed in the nature of the work—to the ruling out certain manufacturing processes until new discoveries can be made.