[EPILOGUE]
| Education is the release of man from self. You have to widen the horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge their sympathies. Under your guidance and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the Universe.—"The World Set Free." |
[MODERN SHELL: TO-MORROW]
In the first place it must be borne in mind that one great difference in the attitude of this form to life in general in the future will be caused by the fact that it will be a mixed class of boys and girls, and will be recruited from all sections of the people, so that there will be every chance of there being practically no divergence in age, physique or intelligence between the top and bottom, to use the existing phraseology, between A and Z, as they will then be placed.
The boys and girls will be permitted to get up as early in the morning as they like, but not later than 7.30 in the summer months. Breakfast will follow at once in different Houses, boys and girls sitting at the same table as much mixed as possible, friend with friend. Chapel for those who wish to go will follow, a service short, devotional, sincere, containing a few personal prayers, a rousing well-known hymn and a lesson of particular applicability not necessarily taken from the Bible alone, but from any of the great masterpieces of the world. Masters and mistresses who feel inspired to give a personal address of not more than five minutes on any problem that may have been occupying their minds may interpolate their sermonette in the place of this lesson. This, the only service of the day, will not take longer than twelve minutes. If the weather is fine most of the work of the day will be done out of doors, some of it, such as the manual labour classes, the digging, road-mending, gardening, will necessarily be so, but in favourable circumstances the intellectual side of the curriculum will be as far as possible carried out in the open air. If, however, this is to-day impossible, the Latin hour will be conducted in a classroom, where inspiring pictures, replicas of old masters and pieces of sculpture will make an already bright, airy, cheerful, healthy classroom still more so.
The master, mistress, girls and boys will all be dressed in those clothes considered most sane and healthy from the eugenics point of view; flannels and gymnastic dress will probably be most popular. The Latin taught will certainly not be of the grammar-grind sort: conversation will go on between girl and boy, others in the same class will be constructing a Roman amphitheatre, or working out, on a sort of Daily Mail war board, a campaign of Pompey or Cæsar.