The Man of Letters as a Man of Business

on to the next s

as schooling before schools; there was schooling before humanity. I have watched a cat schooling her kittens. Schooling is a part of being young. And we grow u

r us education

lized 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

inued 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 Ind

ore. I do not know. You must ask some such great authority as Professor Breasted about that. It may be f

ated people would agree that so long as we live we learn and ought to learn-

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 gene

life has passed out of our minds, has given place to a new realization of the need of continuous adaptation to the

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 be

ng and the phase of adult learni

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 d

deal of technical study comes into the college stage. The budding lawyer begins to read law, the doctor starts his professional studies, the future engi

to college, we have now in every civilized country the evening con

oint of view of service, they are not the so

t in it is a sort of preparatory pause and inspection of the whole arena

themselves, and the college education is essentially

es. It was then we really took hold of social and political ideas, when we became alive to lit

tuff could very well have been done in the schooling stage-but the arguments of the debating society, the discussions that broke out in the classroom or l

else in my own college course-somethin

nder 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

ose three years of work were educational-that they gave a vision of the universe as a whole and a discipline and

t 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,

tions. And in order that they may be established firmly and clearly, it is necessary that the developing young man o

t the same sort of question

aximum possible efficiency? And could it not be extended from its present

the first of thes

broad issues of various current questions plain a

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 t

e matters up. Many elderl

e college will not give them the representative books, a fair statement of the facts and views, and some guidance through the maze of th

escent want to judge for themselves, and ought to

se that determine the pri

Atlantic, a great battle rages between dogma and concea

. I find it hard even to imagi

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 kno

s this to

There is still a general tendency in universities on both sides of the Atlantic to t

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

etation of religious origins and church history by some non-catholic or sceptical e

r religious instruction and discussion. What do they think th

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 myster

ave been incited to attack and smash up the youths suspected of su

d self-respect is anxious to be convinced of Bolshevik doctrine. He believes in Lenin-because h

one should be the study of biology and its substance shoul

med as the highest form of college education in the world--the sort of course that the men take in what is called Greats at O

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 superstition 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 an

d should, in the modern state, pass in

ation, 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 reall

m we opened up in connection with colleg

er most or all of a

he Roman Empire and the Hellenic world. This tradition was already highly developed before the days of printing from movable type, and long before the days when maps or illustrations 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. For that reason the medi?val university teacher was always dividing his subject into firstly and secon

have been through college courses can recall the distress of hearing a dull and inadequate view of a subject being laboriously unfolded in a long series of tedious lectures, in spite of the existence of full and competent text-books. And here again it would seem that the time has come to centralize our best teaching, to c

intelligent audience as a prelude to publication. They may perhaps visit the colleges under their influence, but their basis instrument of instr

the lips of a particular teacher. The young man who reads at eleven o'clock in the morning in luxurious rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, will have no very marked advantage over another young man, employed during the day, who reads at eleven o'clock at night in a bed-sitting-room in Glasgow. The former, you will say, may get commentary and discussion, but th

kes it unnecessary for a man to come "up" to college to be educated, but abolishes the idea that his educational effort comes to an end when he

reat proportion of the youngsters who come in to their colleges never get the realities of a college education at all, and go out into the world again as shallow and uneducated as they came in. And this failure to grasp the great change in educational conditions brought about, for the most part, in the last half-century, accounts for the fact that when we think of any extension of higher education in the modern community we are all too apt to think of it as a great proliferation of expensive, pretentious college buildings and a great multiplica

spirit, such as goes on now at Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Holloway, Wellesley and the like, has probably reached and passed its ma

tories, to the institutes of research, to the hospitals, factories, works, ports, industrial centres and the like where the realities he studies are to be found, or to the studios or workshops or theatres where they practise the art to which he aspires. Here it s

as they are segregations of young people for general adolescent education, and break them as

rial work or specialized technical study up to the age of twenty, at least, in order to

lized forms which I will not discuss now; but in the general modern community the process of continuing education after the college stage is still evidently only at a primitive level of development. There are a certain number of literary societies and societies for the study of particular subjects; the pulpit still performs an educational function; there are public

nstant changes. We are apt to forget its extreme newness in history and to disregard the profound difference in mental conditions it makes between our own times and any former period. It is impossible to believe that thus far it is anything but a sketch and intimation of what it will pre

later developments largely to the advertisement possibilities that came with the expansion of the range of trading as the railways and suchlike means of communication developed. Modern newspapers have been described, not altogether inaptly, as sheets of advertisements with news and discussions printed on the back. The extension of book reading from a small class, chiefly of men, to the whole community has also been largel

to centralize and control it, in spite of Defence of the Realm Acts and the like, is still the production of an unorganized multitude of persons. It is not centralized; it is not controlled. To this fact the nexus of print o

rint nexus could not go very much better than it does, but I am saying that it has a very conside

communication, trade, currency, elementary education, the production and distribution of staples and the conservation of the natural resources of the world go, I believe that the world and the common sense of mankind move ste

ent of the Government. One cannot buy a book or newspaper; one must take what the Government distributes. Free discussion-never a very free thing in Russia-has now on any general scale become quite impossible. It was a difficulty foreseen long ago in Socialist discussions, but never completely met by the thorough-paced Communist. At one blow the active

ment and some interference with the expression of opinion; but on the whole both newspapers and books held their own. There is to-day probably as much freedom of publishing as ever there was. It is not from the western governments

ivist book, Sir Leo Money's Triumph of Nationalization, because it would have interfered with the operation of very large groups which were concerned in getting back public property into private hands on terms advantageous to the latter. It is a book not only important as a statement of a peculiar economic view, but because of the statesmanlike gravity and clearness of its exposition. I do not think it would have been possible to stand between the public and a writer in this way in the years before 1914. A considerable proporti

fewer still take the unsigned portions of the newspaper as written in good faith. And there has been a consequent enhancement of the importance of signed journalism. Men of manifest honesty, men with names to keep clean, have built up r

lopment of the print nexus: nevertheless, it is a very great inconvenience and danger to the world. It stands very much in the way of that universal adult educ

tal clarity of the world if a deliberate lie, whether in an advertisement or in the news or other columns of the press, was punishable-punishable whether it did or did not involve anything that is now an actionable damage. And it would still further strengthen the print nexus and clear the mind of the world if it were compulsory to correct untrue statements in the periodical press, whether they had been made in good faith or not, at least as conspicuously and lengthily a

main conditions essential to the proper growth and activity of a common world mind. On the basis of that sounder education I have sketched in a preceding paper, there is possible such an extension of understanding, such an increase of intelligent co-operations and such a clarific

derlying idea of an education not merely intensive but extensive, planned

l educated for the individual-but of a world educated to a pitch of understanding a

anization, given the will for it, su

this world of mankind to-day seems to me to be a very sinister and dreadful world. It has come to this-that I open my newspaper every morning with a sinking heart, and usually I find little to console me. Every day there is a new tale of silly bloodshed. Every day I read of anger and hate, oppression and misery and want-stupid anger and oppression, needless misery

w that there

all our human disorder is organized education, comprehensive and universal. The watchword of conduct that will clear up all our difficulties is, the plain truth. Rely upon that watchword, use that key with courage and we can go out of the prison in which we live; w

ur children's children will still be living in this jail. But a day will surely come when that door will open wide and all