The Informative Content of Education

H.G. Wells

SURVEY GRAPHIC, November 1937, Volume XXVI, No. 11

I HAVE BEEN KEENLY INTERESTED FOR A NUMBER OF years, and particularly since the war, in public thought and public reactions, in what people know and think and what they are ready to believe. What they know and think and what they are ready to believe impresses me as remarkably poor stuff. A general ignorance - even in respectable quarters - of some of the most elementary realities of the political and social life of the world is, I believe, mainly accountable for much of the discomfort and menace of our times. The uninstructed public intelligence of our community is feeble and convulsive. It is still a herd intelligence. It tyrannizes here and yields to tyranny there. What is called elementary education throughout the world does not in fact educate, because it does not properly inform. I realized this very acutely during the latter stages of the war and it has been plain in my mind ever since. It led to my taking an active part in the production of various outlines and summaries of cotemporary knowledge. Necessarily they had the defects and limitations of a private adventure but in making them I learnt a great deal about - what shall I say? - the contents of the minds our schools are turning out as taught.

And so now I propose to concentrate the attention of this section for this meeting* on the question of what is taught as fact, that is to say upon the informative side of educational work. For this year I suggest we give the questions of drill, skills, art, music, the teaching of other symbols, physical, aesthetic, moral and religious training and development a rest, and that we concentrate on the inquiry: What are we telling young people directly about the world in which they are to live? What is the world picture we are presenting to their minds? What is the framework of conceptions about reality and about obligation into which the rest of their mental existences will have to be fitted? I am proposing in fact a review of the informative side of education, wholly and solely - informative in relation to the needs of modern life.

And here the fact that I am an educational outsider - which in every other relation would be a disqualification - gives me certain very real advantages. I can talk with exceptional frankness. And I am inclined to think that in this matter of the informative side of education frankness has not always been conspicuous. For what I say I am responsible only to the hearer and my own self-respect. I occupy no position from which I can be dismissed as unsound in my ideas. I follow no career that can be affected by anything I say. I follow, indeed, no career. That’s all over. I have no party, no colleagues or associates who can be embarrassed by any unorthodox suggestions I make. Every schoolmaster, every teacher, nearly every professor must, by the nature of his calling, be wary, diplomatic, compromising - he has his governors to consider, his college to consider, his parents to consider, the local press to consider; he must not say too much nor say anything that might be misinterpreted and misunderstood. I can. And so I think I can best serve the purposes of the British Association and this section by taking every advantage of my irresponsibility, being as unorthodox and provocative as I can be, and so possibly saying a thing or two which you are not free to say but which some of you at any rate will be more or less willing to have said.

NOW WHEN I SET MYSELF TO REVIEW THE FIELD OF INQUIRY I have thus defined, I found it was necessary to take a number of very practical preliminary issues into account. As educators we are going to ask what is the subject-matter of a general education? What do we want known? And how do we want it known? What is the essential framework of knowledge that should be established in the normal citizen of our modern community? What is the irreducible minimum of knowledge for a responsible human being today?

I say irreducible minimum - and I do so because I know at least enough of school work to know the grim significance of the school time table and of the leaving school age. Under contemporary conditions our only prospect of securing a mental accord throughout the community is by laying a common foundation of knowledge and ideas in the school years. No one believes today as our grandparents - perhaps for most of you it would be better to say great-grandparents - believed, that education had an end somewhere about adolescence. Young people then left school or college under the imputation that no one could teach them any more. There has been a quiet but complete revolution in people’s ideas in this respect and now it is recognized almost universally that people in a modern community must be learners to the end of their days. We shall be giving a considerable amount of attention to continuation, adult and postgraduate studies in this section, this year. It would be wasting our opportunities not to do so. Here in Nottingham University College we have the only professorship of adult education in England, and under Professor Peers the adult education department which is in close touch with the Workers' Educational Association has broadened its scope far beyond the normal range of adult education. Our modern idea seems to be a continuation of learning not only for university graduates, and practitioners in the so-called intellectual professions, but for the miner, the plough-boy, the taxicab driver, and the out-of-work throughout life. Our ultimate aim is an entirely educated population.

NEVERTHELESS IT IS TRUE THAT WHAT I MAY CALL THE MAIN beams and girders of the mental framework must be laid down, soundly or unsoundly, before the close of adolescence. We live under conditions where it seems we are still only able to afford for the majority of our young people, freedom from economic exploitation, teachers even of the cheapest sort and some educational equipment, up to the age of fourteen or fifteen, and we have to fit our projects to that. And even if we were free to carry on with unlimited time and unrestrained teaching resources, it would still be in those opening years that the framework of the mind would have to be made. We have got to see, therefore, that whatever we propose as this irreducible minimum of knowledge must be imparted between infancy and - at most, the fifteenth or sixteenth year. Roughly, we have to get it into ten years at the outside.

And next let us turn to another relentlessly inelastic packing case and that is, the school time table. How many hours in the week have we got for this job in hand? The maximum school hours we have available are something round about thirty, but out of this we have to take time for what I may call the non-informative teaching, teaching to read, teaching to write clearly, the native and foreign language teaching, basic mathematical work, drawing, various forms of manual training, music, and so forth. A certain amount of information may be mixed in with these subjects but not very much. They are not what I mean by informative subjects. By the time we are through with these non-informative subjects, I doubt if at the most generous estimate we can apportion more than six hours a week to informative work. Then let us, still erring on the side of generosity, assume that there are forty weeks of schooling in the year. That gives us a maximum of 240 hours in the year. And if we take ten years of schooling as an average human being’s preparation for life, and if we disregard the ravages made upon our school time by measles, chickenpox, whooping cough, coronations and occasions of public rejoicing, we are given 2400 hours as all that we can hope for as our time allowance for building up a coherent picture of the world, the essential foundation of knowledge and ideas, in the minds of our people. The complete framework of knowledge has to be established in 200 dozen hours. It is plain that a considerable austerity is indicated for us. We have no time to waste, if our schools are not to go on delivering, year by year, fresh hordes of fundamentally ignorant, unbalanced, uncritical minds, at once suspicious and credulous, weakly gregarious, easily baffled and misled, into the monstrous responsibilities and dangers of this present world. Mere cannon fodder and stuff for massacres and stampedes.

Our question becomes therefore: “What should people know - whatever else they don't know? Whatever else we may leave over - for leisure time reading, for being picked up or studied afterwards - what is the irreducible minimum that we ought to teach as clearly, strongly and conclusively as we know how?”

And now I - and you will remember my role is that of the irresponsible outsider, the citizen at large - I am going to set before you one scheme of instruction for your consideration. For it I demand all those precious 2400 hours. You will perceive, as I go on, the scheme is explicitly exclusive of several contradictory and discursive subjects that now find a place in most curricula, and you will also find doubts arising in your mind about the supply and competence of teachers, a difficulty about which I hope to say something before my time is up. But teachers are for the world and not the world for teachers. If the teachers we have today are not equal to the task required of them, then we have to recondition our teachers to replace them. We live in an exacting world and a certain minimum of performance is required of us all. If children are not to be given at least this minimum of information about the world into which they have come - through no fault of their own - then I do think it would be better for them and the world if they were not born at all. And to make what I have to say as clear as possible I have had a diagram designed which I will unfold to you as my explanation unfolds.

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YOU HAVE ALREADY NOTED I HAVE EXPOSED THE OPENING stage of my diagram. You see I make a three-fold division of the child’s impressions and the matters upon which its questions are most lively and natural. I say nothing about the child learning to count, scribble, handle things, talk and learn the alphabet and so forth because all these things are ruled out by my restriction of my address to information only. Never mind now what it wants to do - or wants to feel. This is what it wants to know. In all educational matters, there is, of course, an element of overlap. As it learns about things and their relationship and interaction its vocabulary increases and its ideas of expression develop. You will make an allowance for that.

And now I bring down my diagram to expose the first stage of positive and deliberate teaching. We begin telling true stories of the past and of other lands. We open out the child’s mind to a realization that the sort of life it is living is not the only life that has been lived and that human life in the past has been different from what it is today and on the whole that it has been progressive. We shall have to teach a little about law and robbers, kings and conquests, but I see no need at this stage to afflict the growing mind with dates and dynastic particulars. I hope the time is not far distant when children even of eight or nine will be freed altogether from the persuasion that history is a magic recital beginning “William the Conqueror, 1066.” Much has been done in that direction. Much remains to be done. Concurrently, we ought to make the weather and the mud pie our introduction to what Huxley christened long ago Elementary Physiography. We ought to build up simple and clear ideas from natural experience.

There I think you have stuff enough for all the three or four hundred hours we can afford for the foundation stage of knowledge. Outside this substantial teaching of school hours the child will be reading and indulging in imaginative play - and making that clear distinction children do learn to make between truth and fantasy - about fairyland, magic carpets and seven league boots, and all the rest of it. So far as my convictions go I think that the less young children have either in or out of school of what has hitherto figured as history, the better. I do not see either the charm or the educational benefit of making an important subject of and throwing a sort of halo of prestige and glory about the criminal history of royalty, the murder of the Princes in the Tower, the wives of Henry VIII, the families of Edward I and James I, the mistresses of Charles II, Sweet Nell of Old Drury, and all the rest of it. I suggest that the sooner we get all that unpleasant stuff out of schools, and the sooner that [we cease teaching] the border bickerings of England, France, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, Bannockburn, Flodden, Crecy and Agincourt, the nearer our world will be to a sane outlook upon life. In this survey of what a common citizen should know I am doing my best to elbow the scandals and revenges which once passed as English history into an obscure corner or out of the picture altogether.

But I am not proposing to eliminate history from education - far from it. Let me bring down my diagram a stage further and you will see how large a proportion of our treasure of 2400 hours I am proposing to give to history. The next section represents about 800 to 1000 pre-adolescent hours. It is the schoolboy-schoolgirl stage. And here the history is planned to bring home to the new generation the reality that the world is now one community. I believe that the crazy combative patriotism that plainly threatens to destroy civilization today is ver largely begotten in their school history lessons. Our schools take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and they inflame and fix its barbarism. I think we underrate the formative effect of this perpetual reiteration of how we won, how our Empire grew and how relatively splendid we have been in every department of life. We are blinded by habit and custom to the way it iinfects these growing minds with the chronic and nearly incurable disease of national egotism. Equally mischievous is the furtive anti-patriotism of the leftish teacher. I suggest that we take on our history from the simple descriptive anthropology of the elementary stage to the story of the early civilizations.

WE ARE DEALING HERE WITH MATERIAL THAT WAS NOT EVEN available for the schoolmasters and mistresses who taught our fathers. It did not exist. But now we have the most lovely stuff to hand, far more exciting and far more valuable than than the quarrels of Henry II and a Becket or the peculiar unpleasantnesses of King James or King John. Archaeologists have been piecing together a record of the growth of the primary civilizations and the developing roles of priest, king, farmer, warrior, the succession of stone and copper and iron, the appearance of horse and road and shipping in the expansions of those primordial communities. It is a far finer story to tell a boy or girl and there is no reason why it should not be told. Swinging down upon these early civilizations came first the Semitic-speaking peoples and then the Aryan-speaking Persian, Macedonian, Roman, followed one another. Christendom inherited from Rome and Islam from Persia, and the world began to assume the shapes we know today. This is great history and also in its broad lines it is a simple history - upon it we can base a lively modern intelligence, and now it can be put in a form just as comprehensible and exciting for the school phase as the story of our English kings and their territorial, dynastic and sexual entanglements. When at last we focus our attention on the British Isles and France we shall have the affairs of these regions in a proper proportion to the rest of the human adventure. And our young people will be thinking less like gossiping court pages and more like horse riders, seamen, artist-artisans, road makers and city builders, which which I take it is what in spirit we want them to be. Measured by the great current of historical events, English history up to quite recent years is mere hole-and-corner history.

And I have to suggest another exclusion. We are telling our young people about the real past, the majestic expansion of terrestrial events. In these events the little region of Palestine is no more than a part of the highway between Egypt and Mesopotamia. Is there any real reason nowadays for exaggerating its importance in the past? Nothing really began there, nothing was worked out there. All the historical part of the Bible abounds in wild exaggeration of the importance of this little strip of land. We were all brought up to believe in the magnificence of Solomon’s temple and it is a startling thing for most of us to read the account of its decorations over again and turn its cubits into feet. It was smaller than most barns. We all know the peculiar delight of devout people when amidst the endless remains of the great empires of the past some dubious fragment is found to confirm the existence of the Hebrews. Is it not time that we recognized the relative historical insignificance of the events recorded in Kings and Chronicles, and ceased to throw the historical imagination of our young people out of perspective by an over-emphasized magnification of the national history of Judea? Tp me this lack of proportion in our contemporary historical teaching, seems largely responsible for the present troubles of the world. The political imagination of our times is a hunchbacked imagination bent down under an exaggeration. It is becoming a matter of life and death to the world to straighten that backbone and reduce that frightful nationalist hunch.

Look at our time table and what we have to teach. If we history four tenths of all the time we have for imparting knowledge at this stage that still gives us at most something a little short of 400 hours altogether. Even if we think it desirable to perplex another generation with the myths of the Creation, the Flood, the Chosen People, and so forth, even if we want to bias it politically with tales of battles and triumphs and ancient grievances, we haven't got the time for it - any more than we have the time for the really quite unedifying records of all the Kings and Queens of England and their claims on this and that. So far as the school time table goes we are faced with a plain alternative. One thing or the other. Great history or hole-and-corner history? The story of mankind or the narrow, self-righteous, blinkered stories of the British Islands and the Jews?

THERE IS A LOT MORE WE HAVE TO PUT INTO THE HEADS OF our young people over and above history. It is the main subject of instruction, but even so it is not even half of the informative work that ought to be got through in this school stage. We have to consider the collateral subject of geography and a general survey of the world. We want to see our world in space as well as our world in time. We may have a little map-making here, but I take it what is needed most are reasonably precise ideas of the various types of country and the distinctive floras and faunas of the main regions of the world. We do not want our budding citizens to chant lists of capes and rivers, but we do want them to have a real picture in their minds of the forests, the pampas, the various phases in the course of the Nile, the landscape of Labrador mountains, and so on, and also we want something like a realization of the sort of human life that is led in these regions. We have enormous resources now in cheap photography, in films, and so forth, that even our fathers never dreamt of - to make all this vivid and real. New methods are needed to handle these new instruments but they need not be overwhelmingly costly. And also our new citizen should know enough of topography to realize why London and Rio and New York and Rome and Suez happen to be where they are and what sort of places they are.

Geography and history run into each other in this respect and, on the other hand, geography reaches over to biology. Here again our schools lag some fifty years behind contemporary knowledge. The past half-century has written a fascinating history of the succession of living things in time and made plain all sorts of processes in the prosperity, decline, extiriction, and replacement of species. We can sketch the wonderful and inspiring story of life now from its beginning. Moreover, we have a continually more definite account of the sequence of sub-man in the world and the gradual emergence of our kind. This is elementary, essential, interesting and stimulating stuff for the young, and it is impossible to consider anyone a satisfactory citizen who is still ignorant of that great story.

AND FINALLY, WE HAVE THE SCIENCE OF INANIMATE MATTER in a world of machinery, optical instruments, electricity, radio and so forth, we want to lay a sound foundation of pure physics and chemistry upon the most modern lines - for everyone. Some of this work will no doubt overlap the mathematical teaching and the manual traintric, and steal a little badly needed time from them. And finally to meet awakening curiosity and take the morbidity out of it, we have to tell our young people and especially our young townspeople, about the working of their bodies, about reproduction and about the chief diseases, enfeeblements and accidents that lie in wait for them in the world.

That I think completes my summary of all the information we can hope to give in the lower school stage. And as I make it I am acutely aware of your unspoken comment. With such teachers as we have! Teachers trained only to reaction, overworked, underpaid, hampered by uninspiring examinations, without initiative, without proper leisure. Young and inexperienced, or old and discouraged. You may do this sort of thing, here and there, under favorable conditions, with the splendid elite of the profession, the 10 percent who are interested, but not as a general state of affairs.

Well, I think that it is a better rule of life, firstto make sure of what you want and then set about getting it, rather than to consider what you can easily, safely and meanly get and then set about reconciling yourself to it. I admit we cannot have a modern education without a modernized type of teacher. A teacher enlarged and released. Many of our teachers - and I am not speaking only of elementary schools - are shockingly illiterate and ignorant. Often they know nothing but school subjects; some times they scarcely know them. Even the medical profession does not present such extremes - between the discouraged routine worker and the enthusiast. Everything I am saying now implies a demand for more and better teachers - better paid, with better equipment. And these teachers will have to be kept fresh. It is scontemporary digesting of knowledge. Still less do our school libraries. They are ten, fifteen years out of date with much of their information. Our prison libraries, by the by, are even worse. I was told the other day of a virtuous prisoner who wanted to improve his mind about radio. The prison had a collection of technical works made for such an occasion and the latest book on radio was dated 1920. There is, I have been told, an energetic New School Books Association at work in this field, doing what it can to act in concert with those all too potent authorities who frame our examination syllabuses. I am all for burning old school books. Some day perhaps we shall have school books so made that at the end of ten or twelve years, let us say, they will burst into flames and inflict severe burns upon any hands in which they find themselves. But at present that is a little - Utopian. It is even more applicable to the next stage of knowledge to which we are now coming.

THIS STAGE REPRESENTS OUR LAST 1000 HOURS AND ROUGHLY I will call it the upper form or upper standard stage. It is really the closing phase of the available school period. Some of the matter I have marked for the history of this grade might perhaps be given in grade B and vice versa. We have still a lot to do if we are to provide even a skeleton platform for the mind of our future citizen. He has still much history to learn before his knowledge can make an effective contact with his duties as a Voter. You see I am still reserving four tenths of the available time, that is to say nearly 400 hours for history. But now we are presenting a more detailed study of such phenomena as the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Russia, the history of the Baltic, the rise and fall of the Spanish power, the Dutch, the first and second British Empires, the belated unifications of Germany and Italy. Then as I have written we want our modern citizen to have some grasp of the increasing importance of economic changes in history and the search for competent economic direction and also of the leading theories of individualism, socialism, the corporate state, communism.

For the next five-and-twenty years now the ordinary man all over the earth will be continually confronted with these systems of ideas. They are complicated systems with many implications and applications. Indeed they are aspects of life rather than systems of ideas. But we send out our young people absolutely unprepared for the heated and biased interpretations they will encounter. We hush it up until they are in the thick of it. And can we complain of the consequences? The most the poor silly young things seem able to make of it is to be violently and self-righteously Anti-something or other. Anti-Red, Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Fascist. The more ignorant you are the easier it is to be an Anti. To hate something without having anything substantial to put against it. Blame something else. A special sub-section of history in this grade should be a course in the history of war, which is always written and talked about by the unwary as though it had always been the same thing, while as a matter of fact - except for its violence - it has changed profoundly with every change in social, political and economic life. Clearly parallel to this history our young people need now a more detailed and explicit acquaintance with world geography, with the different types of population in the world and the developed and undeveloped resources of the globe. The devastation of the world’s forests, the replacement of pasture by sand deserts through haphazard cultivation, the waste and exhaustion of natural resources, coal, petrol, water, that is now going on, the massacre of important animals, whales, penguins, seals, food fish, should be matters of universal knowledge and concern.

Then our new citizens have to understand something of the broad elements in our modern social structure. They should be given an account of the present phase of communication and trade, of production and invention and above all they need whatever plain knowledge is available about the conventions of property and money. Upon these interrelated conventions human society rests, and the efficiency of their working is entirely dependent upon the general state of mind throughout the world. We know now that what used to be called the inexorable laws of political economy and the laws of monetary science, are really no more than rash generalizations about human behavior, supported by a maximum of pompous verbiage and a minimum of scientific observation. Most of our young people come on to adult life, to employment, business and the rest of it, blankly ignorant even of the way in which money has changed slavery and serfdom into wages employment and of how its fluctuations in value make the industrial windmills spin or flag. They are not even warned of the significance of such words as inflation or deflation, and so the wage earners are the helpless prey at every turn towards prosperity of the savings-snatching financier. Any plausible monetary charlatan can secure their ignorant votes. They know no better. They cannot help themselves. Yet the subject of property and money - together they make one subiect because money is onlv the fluid form of property - is scarcely touched upon in any stage in the education of any class in our community. They know nothing about it; they are as innocent as young lambs and born like them for shearing.

AND NOW HERE, YOU WILL SEE I HAVE A VERY SPECIAL PANEL. This I have called Personal Sociology. Our growing citizen has reached an age of self-consciousness and self-determination. He is on the verge of adolescence. He has to be initiated. Moral training does not fall within the scope of the infomative content of teaching. Already the primary habits of truthfulness, frankness, general honesty, communal feeling, helpfulness and generosity will or will not have been fostered and established in the youngster’s mind by the example of those about him. A mean atmosphere makes mean people, a too competitive atmosphere makes greedy, self-glorifying people, a cruel atmosphere makes fierce people, but this issue of moral tone does not concern us now here. But it does concern us that by adolescence the time has arrived for general ideas about one’s personal relationship to the universe to be faced. The primary propositions of the chief religious and philosophical interpretations of the world should be put as plainly and impartially as possible before our young people. They will be asking those perennial questions of adolescence - whence and why and whither. They will have to face, almost at once, the heated and exciting propagandas of theological and sceptical partisans - pro’s and anti’s. So far as possible we ought to provide a ring of clear knowledge for these inevitable fights. And also, as the more practical aspect of the question, What am I to do with my life? I think we ought to link with our general study of social structure a study of social types which will direct attention to the choice of a metier. In what spirit will you face the world and what sort do you feel like? This subject of Personal Sociology as it is projected here is the informative equivalent of a confirmation class. It says to everyone: “There are the conditions under which you face your world.” The response to these questions, the determination of the will, is however not within our present scope. That is a matter for the religious teacher, intimate friends and for the inner impulses of the individual. But our children must have the facts.

Finally, you will see that I have apportioned some time, roughly two tenths of our 1000 hours, in this grade to the acquisition of specialized knowledge. Individuality is becoming conscious of itself and specialization is beginning.

THUS I BUDGET, SO TO SPEAK, FOR OUR 2400 HOURS OF INFORMATIVE teaching. We have brought our young people to the upper form, the upper standard. Most of them are now going into employment or special training and so taking on a role in the collective life. But there remain some very essential things which cannot be brought into school teaching, not through any want of time, but because of the immaturity of the growing mind. If we are to build a real modern civilization we must go on with definite informative instruction into and even beyond even beyond adolescence. Children and young people are likely to be less numerous proportionally in the years ahead of us in all the more civilized populations and we cannot afford to consume them in premature employment after the fashion of the preceding centuries. The average age of our population is rising and this involves an upward extension of education. And so to date, keeping in touch with the living movements about us. I have given a special line to those reconditioning courses, that must somehow be made a normal part in the lives of working professional men. It is astonishing how stale most middle-aged medical men, teachers and solicitors are today. And beyond Grade E I have put a further ultimate grade for the fully adult human being. He or she is learning now, no longer only from books and newspapers and teachers, though there has still to be a lot of that, but as a worker with initiative, making experiments, learning frorn new experience, an industrialist, an artist, an original writer, a responsible lawyer, an administrator, a statesman, an explorer, a scientific investigator. Grade F accumulates, rectifies, changes human experience. And here I bring in an obsession of mine with which I have dealt before the Royal Institution and elsewhere. You see, indicated by these arrows, the rich results of the work of Grade F flowing into a central world-encyclopaedic-organization, where it will be continually summarized, clarified, and whence it will be distributed through the general information channels of the world.

So I complete my general scheme of the knowledge organization of a modern community and submit it to you.

I put it before you in good faith as a statement of my convictions. I do not know how it will impress you and I will not anticipate your criticisms. It may seem impossibly bold and “Utopian.” But we are living in a world in which a battleship costs £8 million, in which we can raise an extra £400 million for armaments with only a slight Stock Exchange qualm, and which has seen the Zeppelin, the radio, the bombing aeroplane come absolutely out of nothing since 1900. And our schools are going along very much as they were going along thirty-seven years ago. There is only one thing I would like to say in conclusion. Please do me the justice to remember that this is a project for Knowledge Organization only and solely. It is not an entire scheme of education I am putting before you. It is only a part and a limited part of education - the factual side of education - I have discussed. There are 168 hours in a week and I am dealing with the use of rather less than six during the school year of less than forty weeks-for ten years. It is no good saying as though it was an objection either to my paper or to me, that I neglect or repudiate spiritual, emotional and aesthetic values. They are not disregarded, but they have no place at all in this particular part of the educational scheme. I have said nothing about music, dancing, drawing, painting, exercise and so on and so forth. Not because I would exclude them from education but because they do not fall into the limits of my subject. You no more want these lovely and elementary things mixed up with a conspectus of knowledge than you want playfulness in an ordnance map or perplexing whimsicality on a clock face. You have the remaining 162 hours a week for all that. But the spiritual, emotional, aesthetic lives our children are likely to lead, will hardly be worth living, unless they are sustained by such a clear, full and sufficient backbone of knowledge as I have ventured to put before you here.

* This is the presidential address to the educational science section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, given on September 2, 1937, at Nottingham, as read by Mr. Wells.

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