66 Scientifically we know more of one another, and yet, like the receding galaxies, we seem to become each lonelier, remoter. So most of us concentrate, in an apparently meaningless and only too evidently precarious universe, on extracting as much pleasure for ourselves as we can. We act as if we were born into the death cell; condemned to a dangerous age, to an inevitable holocaust; to a being whose only significant aspects are that it is ludicrously brief and ends in a total extinction of the power to enjoy. What hollows us operates, like an awl, in two directions simultaneously. We have not only an exasperating inability to get all that we want but also the excoriating counter-cutting fear that what we want to get is, in terms of a dimly glimpsed but far richer human reality, worthless. Never were there so many hollow people in the world, like a huge and mounting shore of empty cockleshells.
67 Everywhere we see the need for change; and in so few places the satisfaction of that need. I come now to the vital factor. It is education.
9
A NEW EDUCATION
1 At present almost all our education is directed to two ends: to get wealth for the state and to gain a livelihood for the individual. It is therefore little wonder that society is money-obsessed, since the whole tenor of education seems to indicate that this obsession is both normal and desirable.
2 In spite of the fact that we now have almost universal education, we are qualitatively one of the least-educated ages, precisely because education has everywhere surrendered to economic need. Relatively far better educations were received by the fortunate few in the eighteenth century; in the Renaissance; in ancient Rome and Greece. The aims of education in all those periods were far superior to our own* they opened the student admirably to the understanding and enjoyment of life and to his responsibilities tot wards society. Of course the facts and subjects of the old classical education are largely unnecessary to us today; and of course it was the product of a highly unjust economic situation, but at its best it arrived at something none of our present systems remotely approach: the rounded human being.
3 There should be four main aims in a good education. The first is the one that pre-empts all present systems: the training of the pupil for an economic role in society. The second is teaching the nature of society and the human polity. The third is teaching the richness of existence. And the fourth is the establishment of that sense of relative recompense which man, in contrast to the other orders of animate life, has so long lost. In simpler terms, we need to fit the students for a livelihood, then for living among other human beings, then for enjoying his own life, and finally for comprehending the purpose (and ultimately, the justice) of existence in human form.
4 Now there are two important distinctions between the first and the latter three of these aims. From the point of view of the state they are to a certain extent hostile. The economy does not want too much attention paid by its workers to social purpose, self-enjoyment and the ultimate nature of existence; it needs intelligent and obedient cogs, not intelligent and independent individuals. And since the state always has a very large say in the nature of the educational system, we can expect little desire for change from politicians and administrators.
5 The second distinction is this: whereas the first economic-role type of education will plainly vary with the economic needs of the nation, and so legitimately vary from country to country, the latter three purposes hardly vary at all, since we are all in the same human situation and endowed with the same senses. In these three fields virtually the same education could be taught all over the world; and should be taught. But this again represents a threat to the identity of the state; and is a second reason why its Servants’ can be expected to oppose any introduction of a universally similar syllabus.
6 Now it may be argued that the best of our universities, at least in the richer and culturally more advanced countries, already provide such an education. Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, the great new Californian universities, the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale, and similar prestigious centres of learning certainly provide a richness of culture where a student can achieve those further three aims if he has the inclination and can find the time. But even here the overriding factor is the examination system. It is only in very recent times that the chief function of a university (or school of any kind) has been taken to be the grading of its students by examination. We know why this is so: to ensure that the most deserving students get the places available. But this immediately reveals the examination system for what it is: a desperate expedient, exactly analogous to rationing food in wartime, in a desperate situation.
7 All the evils of history are attributable to a shortage of schools. And the shortage of schools in our own time is the most desperate in the history of man. The more equality we want, the more education we want; the more means of communication, the more we see the want; the more leisure we gain, the more we need to be taught to use it; and the more populations grow, the more schools they will demand.
8 Each age has a special risk. Ours is letting half the world starve literally and nine-tenths of it starve educationally. No species can afford to be ignorant. The only world in which it could allow itself such a luxury is one in which it had no enemies and had risen above hazard and evolution.
A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
9 Before we can approach the concept of a universal education, we have to consider that of a universal language. Teaching is above all communication, and communication is impossible unless there is a generally understood medium. We therefore need a language that may be taught as a universal second tongue.
10 It is absolutely clear that the attempts to create such a language artificially (Esperanto, Ido and the rest) have failed. Their inventors’ perhaps worthy desire to satisfy national pride by running together disparate elements from different languages leads them all into an absurd impracticability, since one thus destroys any hope of providing teachers who speak the language naturally; there is no existing and tried model to refer to for new developments and resources; and perhaps worst of all, these pseudo-languages can offer no literature.
11 There are four requisites of a universal language:
1. It should be based on an already existing major language.
2. It should be analytic, not synthetic. (Synthetic languages are those that incorporate signs as to meaning and syntactical function inside each word – that is, they have genders, case systems, a widely variable word order; analytic languages have fewer such features and depend far more on a rigorous word order.)
3. It should have a phonetic spelling system based on a limited number of symbols.
4. It should be able to provide an effective simple or basic mode of communication and a fertile and adaptable more complex one.
12 We may at once rule out the numerically most spoken language: Chinese. Its reading symbols are hopelessly unlimited; its pronunciation is tonal (meaning may depend on musical pitch); it is highly dialectal; and it is semantically, as every translator of Chinese poetry knows, bewilderingly imprecise.
13 With one exception all the principal European languages, whether Romance, Teutonic or Slavonic in origin, retain too many synthetic features in syntax and declension. The same is true of Arabic. However interesting and evocative gender-systems and complex verb and noun forms may be in a literary sense, philologically they are redundant. No one designing a new language with ease of learning and functional utility in mind would for a moment retain them.