The Salvaging Of Civilisation Part 9

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.

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 pa.s.sed beyond a special cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.s 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 cla.s.s. .h.i.therto 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.

But important as these things are from the point of view of service, they are not the _soul_--not the real meaning of the college stage.

The soul of the college stage, the most important value about it, is that in it is a sort of preparatory pause and inspection of the whole arena of life. It is the educational concomitant of the stage of adolescence.

The young man and the young woman begin to think for themselves, and the college education is essentially the supply of stimulus and material for that process.

It was in the college stage that most of us made out our religion and made it real for ourselves. It was then we really took hold of social and political ideas, when we became alive to literature and art, when we began the delightful and distressful enterprise of finding ourselves.

And I think most of us will agree when we look back that the most real thing in our college life was not the lecturing and the lessons--very much of that stuff could very well have been done in the schooling stage--but the arguments of the debating society, the discussions that broke out in the cla.s.sroom or laboratory, the talks in one's rooms about G.o.d and religion, about the state and freedom, about art, about every possible and impossible social relationship.

Now in addition to that I had something else in my own college course--something of the same sort of thing but better.

I have spoken of myself as under-educated. My schooling was shocking but, as a blessed compensation, my college stage was rather exceptionally good. My schooling ended when I was thirteen. My father, who was a professional cricketer, was smashed up by an accident, and I had three horrible years in employment in shops. Then my luck changed and I found myself under one of the very greatest teachers of his time, Professor Huxley. I worked at the Royal College of Science in London for one year under him in his great course in zoology, and for a year and a half under a very good but rather uninspiring teacher, Professor Judd, the geologist. I did also physics and astronomy. Altogether I had three full years of science study. And the teaching of biology at that time, as Huxley had planned it, was a continuing, systematic, illuminating study of life, of the forms and appearances of life, of the way of life, of the interplay of life, of the past of life and the present prospect of life. It was a tremendous training in the sifting of evidence and the examination of appearances.

Every man is likely to be bia.s.sed, I suppose, in favour of his own educational course. Yet it seems to me that those three years of work were educational--that they gave a vision of the universe as a whole and a discipline and a power such as no other course, no cla.s.sical or mathematical course I have ever had a chance of testing, could do.

I am so far a believer in a biological backbone for the college phase of education that I have secured it for my sons and I have done all I can to extend it in England. Nevertheless, important as that formal college work was to me, it still seems to me that the informal part of our college life--the talk, the debates, the discussion, the scampering about London to attend great political meetings, to hear William Morris on Socialism, Auberon Herbert on Individualism, Gladstone on Home Rule, or Bradlaugh on Atheism--for those were the lights of my remote student days--was about equally important.

If schooling is a training in expression and communication, college is essentially the establishment of broad convictions. And in order that they may be established firmly and clearly, it is necessary that the developing young man or woman should hear all possible views and see the medal of truth not only from the obverse but from the reverse side.

Now here again I want to put the same sort of questions I have put about schooling.

Is the college stage of our present educational system anywhere near its maximum possible efficiency? And could it not be extended from its present limited range until it reached practically the whole adolescent community?

Let me deal with the first of these questions first.

Could we not do much more than we do to make the broad issues of various current questions plain and accessible to our students in the college stage?

For example, there is a vast discussion afoot upon the questions that centre upon Property, its rights and its limitations. There is a great literature of Collectivist Socialism and Guild Socialism and Communism.

About these things our young people must know. They are very urgent questions; our sons and daughters will have to begin to deal with them from the moment they leave college. Upon them they must form working opinions, and they must know not only what they themselves believe but, if our public affairs are not to degenerate into the squalid, obstinate, hopeless conflicts of prejudiced adherents, they must know also what is believed by other people whose convictions are different from theirs.

You may want to hush these matters up. Many elderly people do. You will fail.

All our intelligent students will insist upon learning what they can of these discussions and forming opinions for themselves. And if the college will not give them the representative books, a fair statement of the facts and views, and some guidance through the maze of these questions, it means merely that they will get a few books in a defiant or underhand way and form one-sided and impa.s.sioned opinions.

Another great set of questions upon which the adolescent want to judge for themselves, and ought to judge for themselves, are the religious questions.

And a third group are those that determine the principles of s.e.xual conduct.

I know that in all these matters, on both sides of the Atlantic, a great battle rages between dogma and concealment on the one hand and open ventilation on the other.

Upon the issue I have no doubt. I find it hard even to imagine the case for the former side.

So long as _schooling_ goes on, the youngster is immature, needs to be protected, is not called upon for judgments and initiatives, and may well be kept under mental limitations. I do not care very much how you censor or select the reading and talking and thinking of the schoolboy or schoolgirl. But it seems to me that with adolescence comes the right to knowledge and the right of judgment. And that it is the _task and duty_ of the college to give matters of opinion in the solid--to let the student walk round and see them from every side.

Now how is this to be done?

I suggest that to begin with we open wide our colleges to propaganda of every sort. There is still a general tendency in universities on both sides of the Atlantic to treat propaganda as infection. For the adolescent it is not--it is a stimulating drug.

Let me instance my own case. I am a man of Protestant origins and with a Protestant habit of mind. But it is a matter of great regret to me that there is no good Roman Catholic propaganda available for my sons in their college life. I would like to have the old Mother Church giving my boys an account of herself and of the part she has played in the history of the world, telling them what she stands for and claims to be, giving her own account of the Ma.s.s. These things are interwoven with our past; they are part of us. I do not like them to go into a church and stare like foreigners and strangers at the altar.

And side by side with that Catholic propaganda I would like them to hear an interpretation of religious origins and church history by some non-catholic or sceptical ethnologist. He, too, should be free to tell his story and drive his conclusions home.

But you will find most colleges and most college societies bar religious instruction and discussion. What do they think they are training? Some sort of genteel recluse--or men and women?

So, too, with the discussion of Bolshevism. I do not know how things are in America but in England there has been a ridiculous attempt to suppress Bolshevik propaganda. I have seen a lot of Bolshevik propaganda and it is not very convincing stuff. But by suppressing it, by police seizures of books and papers and the like, it has been invested with a quality of romantic mystery and enormous significance. Our boys and girls, especially the brighter and more imaginative, naturally enough think it must be tremendous stuff to agitate the authorities in this fashion.

At our universities, moreover, the more loutish types of student have been incited to attack and smash up the youths suspected of such reading. This gives it the glamour of high intellectual quality.

The result is that every youngster in the British colleges with a spark of mental enterprise and self-respect is anxious to be convinced of Bolshevik doctrine. He believes in Lenin--because he has been prevented from reading him. Sober collectivists like myself haven't a chance with him.

But you see my conception of the college course? Its backbone should be the study of biology and its substance should be the threshing out of the burning questions of our day.

You may object to this that I am proposing the final rejection of that discipline in cla.s.sical philosophy which is still claimed as the highest form of college education in the world----the sort of course that the men take in what is called _Greats_ at Oxford. You will accuse me of wanting to bury and forget Aristotle and Plato, Herac.l.i.tus and Lucretius, and so forth and so on.

But I don't want to do that--_so far as their thought is still alive_.

So far as their thought is still alive these men will come into the discussion of living questions now. If they are Ancients and dead then let them be buried and left to the archaeological excavator. If they are still Moderns and alive, I defy you to bury them if you are discussing living questions in a full and honest way. But don't go hunting after them, there are still modern Immortals in the darkness of a forgotten language. Don't make a superst.i.tion of them. Let them come hunting after you. Either they are unavoidable if your living questions are fully discussed, or they are irrelevant and they do not matter. That there is a wisdom and beauty in the cla.s.sics which is incommunicable in any modern language, which obviously neither enn.o.bles nor empowers, but which is nevertheless supremely precious, is a kind of nonsense dear to the second-rate cla.s.sical don, but it has nothing endearing about it for any other human beings. I will not bother you further with that sort of affectation here.

And this college course I have sketched should, in the modern state, pa.s.s insensibly into adult mental activities.

Concurrently with it there will be going on, as I have said, a man's special technical training. He will be preparing himself for a life of industrialism, commerce, engineering, agriculture, medicine, administration, education or what not. And as with the man, so with the woman. That, too, is a process which in this changing new world of ours can never be completed. Neither of these college activities will ever really leave off. All through his life a man or woman should be confirming, fixing or modifying his or her general opinions; and all the time his or her technical knowledge and power should be consciously increased.

And now let me come to the second problem we opened up in connection with college education--the problem of its extension.

Can we extend it over most or all of a modern population?

I don't think we can, if we are to see it in terms of college buildings, cla.s.s rooms, tutors, professors and the like. Here again, just as in the case of schooling, we have to raise the neglected problem--neglected so far as education goes--of economy of effort; and we have to look once more at the new facilities that our educational inst.i.tutions have so far refused to utilize. Our European colleges and universities have a long and honourable tradition that again owes much to the educational methods of the Roman Empire and the h.e.l.lenic world. This tradition was already highly developed before the days of printing from movable type, and long before the days when maps or ill.u.s.trations were printed. The higher education, therefore, was still, as it was in the Stone Age, largely vocal. And the absence of paper and so forth, rendering notebooks costly and rare, made a large amount of memorizing necessary.