CHAPTER VIII
EDUCATION A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
Allowing, as every competent thinker must allow, a full measure of validity to the contention that social developments are matters of slow growth and gradual attainment rather than of sudden and catastrophic change; admitting that even in the sphere of scientific discovery and mechanical invention changes occur much more gradually than a cursory glance at individual achievements would suggest; recognising that many of the most remarkable changes whose arrival in the past is the only possible valid guide to anticipation of similar or kindred changes in the future; it is still a condition of such anticipation that we should take account of causes likely to be operative in altering the rate at which the world will move. To allow that social improvements generally have the air of occurring almost automatically is not to conceive that they are without cause. Neither can it be believed by anyone who has studied the history of such movements in the past, or watched them in current progress, that the rate of development is everywhere and at all periods the same. There have been eras of almost complete moral, and even of almost complete mechanical, stagnation in the history of the world. There have been other eras of almost violent reformation and reconstruction. To reason as if these characteristics were arbitrarily or miraculously imposed upon the physiognomy of society, to be content with laboriously unintelligent estimation of the facts without attempting to learn anything from them of their causes, is to neglect the only important lesson which either history or observation is capable of teaching. When, therefore, an enormous acceleration in a rate of progress already unprecedented in the records of society has been predicted for the next hundred years of human history, it is evident that this anticipation must have been based upon some estimate of forces calculated to be operative in producing acceleration.
So far as scientific or material progress is concerned, it is obvious enough that we shall move forward with increasing momentum, because every discovery and every invention tends automatically to facilitate fresh attainment, and the very growth of population must act in the same way, as must also the struggle for existence. As there are every year more men and women working on scientific research and on mechanical invention, the results must be progressively greater every year; and as the rewards of success are increased by the growing demand resulting from a growing population, it is evident that the incentives to industry in this respect are proportionately liable to increase. But the ethical progress of the world is actuated by forces entirely different, and what makes for mechanical improvement may very easily be conceived—in fact has actually been conceived by one rather conspicuous prophet—to operate adversely upon the moral future of the race.
No secret, however, has been made of the present writer’s belief that our descendants a hundred years hence will have made moral progress quite as remarkable as the mechanical progress of which the anticipation is likely to be contested by no reasonably imaginative observer. This ethical improvement, gradual, and momentarily imperceptible as it may be, necessarily has causes which must now, however tentatively and however cursorily, be examined.
That these causes will be powerful, continuous in action and based upon the fundamentals of human character, is evident. That in their operation they will be opposed by other influences not less easy to foresee is equally manifest. What we have to precognise are the net results likely to be achieved by the interaction of opposing forces, of which those tending to improvement are confidently believed the stronger.
The most powerful of all moral influences in the future will undoubtedly be the reform of education, not merely by the improvement of its methods in various departments, but also, and with much more importance, in the general spirit with which its objects will be conceived. But in order to affirm that this reform will occur, we must first demonstrate that the grounds upon which it is anticipated are adequate. We must, in the terms of the formula above proposed, be satisfied that they are in harmony with the fundamentals of human character.
If there be any human motive of which something approaching universality can be predicted—quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus—it is that of parental solicitude. No progenitor of children, however little amenable to high aspirations, is wholly free from the wish that his offspring shall grow up to be wiser, stronger, better, more prosperous than himself. The innate hopefulness of the race expressed in the arid comment that, in his own estimation, “man never is, but always to be blest,” is often discouraged by the time a man’s children are beginning to grow up, especially in these days of late marriage and deferred parenthood. Realising, as most of us have realised only too acutely by the time we are forty, that we have more or less failed in the ambitions which seemed so easy of future attainment when we were twenty-five, aspiration begins to cast a golden light upon the career of our children, and it is to the successes and the fame of our first-born that we look for consolation in the failure which, for ourselves, we no longer hope to evade. Romance, celebrity, even perhaps worldly reward, we can no longer expect for ourselves; but these dear hands that a little time ago we held while the first tottering steps of babyhood were being tried, shall return to us hereafter with the laurel in them that we have never plucked. Perhaps we shall not live to see it on our child’s brow, but what of that? Our confident prevision of this glory is what we console ourselves withal: this, though we hardly know it, is our True Romance:—