Now that is the sort of thing that still goes on. But it ought to be entirely out of date. All that scientific bric-a-brac in the cupboard had far better be thrown away. All the demonstration experiments that science teachers will require in the future can be performed once for all—before a cinematograph. They can be done finally; they need never be done again. You can get the best and most dexterous teacher in the world—he can do what has to be done with the best apparatus, in the best light; anything that is very minute or subtle you can magnify or repeat from another point of view; anything that is intricate you can record with extreme slowness; you can show the facts a mile off or six inches off, and all that your actual class teacher need do now is to spend five minutes on getting out the films he wants, ten minutes in reading over the corresponding lecture notes, and then he can run the film, give the lesson, question his class upon it, note what they miss and how they take it, run the film again for a second scrutiny, and get out for the subsequent study of the class the ample supply of diagrams and pictures needed to fix the lesson. Can there be any comparison between the educational efficiency of the two methods?
So I put it to you, that it is possible now to make—and that the world needs badly that we should make—a new sort of school, a standardized school, a school richly equipped with modern apparatus and economizing the labour of teaching to an extent at present undreamt of, in which, all over the world, the same stereotyped lessons, leading the youth of the whole world through a parallel course of schooling, can be delivered.
I know that in putting this before you I challenge some of the most popular affectations of cultivated people. I know that many people will be already writhing with a genteel horror at the idea of the same lesson being given in identical terms to everybody in turn throughout the world. It sounds monotonous. It will rob the world of variety—and so on and so on. But indeed it will not be monotonous at all. That lesson will be new and fresh and good to every pupil who receives it. And remember it is by our hypothesis the best possible form and arrangement of that lesson. It is to take the place of a sham lesson or no lesson at all. There is an eternal freshness in learning as in all the other main things in life. It will be no more monotonous than having one's seventh birthday or falling in love for the first time.
And as for variety, I for one do not care how soon every possible variety of ignorance and misconception is banished from the world. The sun shines on the whole world and it is the same sun. I have still to be persuaded that our planet would be more various and interesting if it were lit by two or three thousand uncertain, spasmodic and differently coloured searchlights directed upon it from every direction. I am pleading for a clear white light of education that shall go like the sun round the whole world.
You see that in all this I am driving at—what shall I call it?—syndicated schools, syndicated lesson notes, and, so far as equipment goes, mass production. I want to see the sort of thing happening to schools that has already happened to many sorts of retail shops. In the place of little ill-equipped schools, each run by its own teacher and buying its own books and diagrams and material and so forth in small quantities at high prices, I want to see a great central organization, employing teachers of genius, working in consultation and co-operation and producing lesson notes, diagrams, films, phonograph records, cheaply, abundantly, on a big scale for a nation, or a group of nations, or, if you like, for all the world, just as America produces watches and alarum clocks and cheap automobiles for all the world. And I want to see the schools of the world being run, so far as the intellectual training goes, not by local committees but by that central organization.
It is only by this reorganization of schooling upon the lines of big production that we can hope to get a civilized community in the world at an educational level very markedly higher than the existing educational level.
But if we could so economize teaching energy—if we made our really great teachers, by the use of modern appliances, teachers not of handfuls but of millions; if we insisted upon a universal application of the best and most effective methods of teaching, just as we insist upon the best and most effective methods of street traction and town lighting—then I believe it would be possible to build the civilization of the years to come on a foundation of mental preparation incomparably sounder and higher than anything we know of to-day.
VII
COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK
And now let us go on to the next stages of education.
The schooling process is a natural phase in human development—it is our elaboration of the natural learning of boyhood and girlhood and of adolescence. There was 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 up. So there comes a time when schooling is over, when the process of equipment gives place to an increasing share in the activities and decisions of adult life.
Nevertheless for us education must still go on.
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.