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 archæological 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 mediæval 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.