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 impassioned 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 sexual
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 Mass. 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 classical 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, Heraclitus 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 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 and beauty in the classics which is incommunicable in any
modern language, which obviously neither ennobles nor empowers, but
which is nevertheless supremely precious, is a kind of nonsense dear to
the second-rate classical 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,
pass 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,
class 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 institutions 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 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 mediaeval university teacher was always dividing his
subject into firstly and secondly and fourthly and sixthly and so on, so
that the student could afterwards tick off and reproduce the points on
his fingers--a sort of thumb and finger method of thought--still to be
found in perfection in the discourses of that eminent Catholic
apologist, Mr. Hilaire Belloc. It is a method that destroys all sense of
proportion between the headings; main considerations and secondary and
tertiary points get all catalogued off as equivalent numbers, but it was
a mnemonic necessity of those vanished days.
And they have by no means completely vanished. We still use the lecture
as the normal basis of instruction in our colleges, we still hear
discourses in the firstly, secondly and thirdly form, and we still
prefer even a second-rate professor on the spot to the printed word of
the ablest teacher at a distance. Most of us who 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 create a new sort of wide teaching professor who will
teach not in one college but in many, and to direct the local professor
to the more suitable task of ensuring by a commentary, by organized
critical work, and so forth, that the text-book is duly read, discussed
and compared with the kindred books in the college library.
This means that the great teaching professors will not lecture, or that
they will lecture only to try over their treatment of a subject before
an intelligent audience as a prelude to publication. They may perhaps
visit the colleges under their influence, but their basis instrument of
instruction will be not a course of lectures but a book. They will carry
out the dictum of Carlyle that the modern university is a university of
books.
Now the frank recognition of the book and not the lecture as the
substantial basis of instruction opens up a large and interesting range
of possibilities. It releases the process of learning from its old
servitude to place and to time. It is no longer necessary for the
student to go to a particular room, at a particular hour, to hear the
golden words drop from 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 there is no particular reason why the
latter should not form some sort of reading society with his fellows,
and discuss the question with them in the dinner hour and on the way to
the works. Nor is there any reason why he should not get tutorial help
as a university extension from the general educational organization, as
good in quality as any other tutorial help.
And this release of the essentials of a college education from
limitations of locality and time brought about by modern conditions, not
only makes 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 goes "down." Attendance at college no longer justifies a
claim to education; inability to enter a college is no longer an excuse
for illiteracy.
I do not think that our educational and university authorities realize
how far the college stage of education has already escaped from the
local limitations of colleges; they do not understand what a great and
growing volume of adolescent learning and thought, of college education
in the highest and best sense of the word, goes on outside the walls of
colleges altogether; and on the other they do not grasp the significant
fact that, thanks to the high organization of sports and amusements and
social life in our more prosperous universities, a great 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 multiplication of little teaching
professorships, and a further segregation of so many hundreds or
thousands of our adolescents from the general community, when as a
matter of fact the reality of education has ceased to lie in that
direction at all. The modern task is not to multiply teachers _but to
exalt and intensify exceptionally good teachers_, to recognize their
close relationship with the work of university research--which it is
their business to digest and interpret--and to secure the production and
wide distribution of books throughout the community.
I am inclined to think that the type of adolescent education, very much
segregated in out-of-the-way colleges and aristocratic in spirit, such
as goes on now at Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Holloway, Wellesley and the
like, has probably reached and passed its maximum development. I doubt
if the modern community can afford to continue it; it certainly cannot
afford to extend it very widely.
But as I have pointed out, there has always been a second strand to
college education--the technical side, the professional training or
apprenticeship. Here there are sound reasons that the student should go
to a particular place, to the special museums and laboratories, 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 seems we have natural centres of
aggregation in relation to which the college stage of a civilized
community, the general adolescent education, the vision of the world as
a whole and the realization of the individual place in it, can be
organized most conveniently.
You see that what I am suggesting here is in effect that we should take
our colleges, so far as they are segregations of young people for
general adolescent education, and break them as a cook breaks eggs--and
stir them up again into the general intellectual life of the community.
Coupled with that there should, of course, be a proposal to restrict the
hours of industrial work or specialized technical study up to the age of
twenty, at least, in order to leave time for this college stage in the
general education of every citizen of the world.
The idea has already been broached that men and women in the modern
community are no longer inclined to consider themselves as ever
completely adult and finished; there is a growing disposition and a
growing necessity to keep on learning throughout life. In the worlds of
research, of literature and art and economic enterprise, that adult
learning takes highly specialized 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 lectures and in
America there are the hopeful germs of what may become later on a very
considerable organization of adult study in the Lyceum Chautauqua
system; but for the generality of people the daily newspaper, the Sunday
newspaper, the magazine and the book constitute the only methods of
mental revision and enlargement after the school or college stage is
past.
Now we have to remember that the bulk of this great organization of
newspapers and periodicals and all the wide distribution of books that
goes on to-day are extremely recent things. This new nexus of print has
grown up in the lifetime of four or five generations, and it is
undergoing constant 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 presently be. It has grown. No man foresaw it; no one planned
it. We of this generation have grown up with it and are in the habit of
behaving as though this nexus had always been with us and as though it
would certainly remain with us. The latter conclusion is almost wilder
than the former.
By what we can only consider a series of fortunate accidents, the press
and the book world have provided and do provide a necessary organ in the
modern world state, an organ for swift general information upon matters
of fact and for the rapid promulgation and diffusion of ideas and
interpretations. The newspaper grew, as we know, out of the news-letter
which in a manuscript form existed before the Roman Empire; it owes its
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
largely a response to new facilities; though it owes something also to
the religious disputes of the last three centuries. The population of
Europe, one may say with a certain truth, first learnt to read the
Bible, and only afterwards to read books in general. A large proportion
of the book publishing in the English language in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries still consisted of sermons and controversial
theological works.
Both newspaper and book production began in a small way as the
enterprise of free individuals, without anyone realizing the dimensions
to which the thing would grow. Our modern press and book trade, in spite
of many efforts 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 owes what is still its most valuable
quality. Thoughts and ideas of the most varied and conflicting sort
arise and are developed and worked out and fought out in this nexus,
just as they do in a freely thinking vigorous mind.
I am not, you will note, saying that this freedom is perfect or that the
thought process of the print nexus could not go very much better than it
does, but I am saying that it has a very considerable freedom and vigour
and that so far as it has these qualities it is a very fine thing
indeed.
Now many people think that we are moving in the direction of world
socialism to-day. Collectivism is perhaps a better, more definite word
than socialism, and, so far as keeping the peace goes, and in matters of
transport and 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 steadily towards a world collectivism. But
the more co-operation we have in our common interests, the more
necessary is it to guard very jealously the freedom of the mind, that is
to say, the liberty of discussion and suggestion.
It is here that the Communist regime in Russia has encountered its most
fatal difficulty. A catastrophic unqualified abolition of private
property has necessarily resulted in all the paper, all the printing
machinery, all the libraries, all the news-stalls and book shops,
becoming Government property. It is impossible to print anything without
the consent 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 mental life of Russia has been ended, and so long
as Russia remains completely and consistently communist it cannot be
resumed. It can only be resumed by some surrender of paper, printing and
book distribution from absolute Government ownership to free individual
control. That can only be done by an abandonment of the full rigours of
communist theory.
In our western communities the dangers to the intellectual nexus lie
rather on the other side. The war period produced considerable efforts
at Government control and as a consequence considerable annoyance to
writers, much concealment 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 that mischief is likely to
come to free intellectual activity in the western communities but from
the undisciplined individual, and from the incitements to mob violence
by propagandist religions and cults against free discussion.
About the American press I know and can say little. I will speak only of
things with which I am familiar. I am inclined to think that there has
been a considerable increase of deliberate lying in the British press
since 1914, and a marked loss of journalistic self-respect. Particular
interests have secured control of large groups of papers and pushed
their particular schemes in entire disregard of the general mental
well-being. For instance, there has recently been a remarkable boycott
in the London press of a very able collectivist 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 proportion of the industrial and commercial news is now
written to an end. The British press has also suffered greatly from the
outbreak of social and nationalist rancour arising out of the great war,
the inability of the European mind to grasp the Bolshevik issue, and the
clumsy blunderings of the Versailles settlement. Quite half the news
from Eastern Europe that appears in the London press is now deliberate
fabrication, and a considerable proportion of the rest is rephrased and
mutilated to give a misleading impression to the reader.