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 passed beyond a special class 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 passed 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 passed 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 mass 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 class hitherto 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 classroom or laboratory, the talks in one's rooms about God 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 biassed, 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 classical 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 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.