July i, 1920] 



NATURE 



561 



Education in the New Era. 



T N addresses given in Leeds last February Mr. F. W. 

 -*■ Sanderson, headmaster of Oundle School, very 

 boldly faces the root of the evil in existing educational 

 systems as it is felt in the school, and advocates 

 radical reconstruction upon new lines. His view is 

 that schools should be altruistic in their aims and 

 methods and be based on service and co-operation 

 rather than on competition. They exist solely to 

 aid and enrich the life of the people. Traditional 

 methods based upon public-school models accentuate 

 the anti-social spirit of competition and darrip down 

 co-operation, whereas the schools of the country ought 

 to be the source from which the transfiguring and 

 transforming spirit of the age is breathed through the 

 thoughts of men. A school is a microcosm, and its 

 subject-matter is to be found, not in books, but in the 

 world around it, of which it itself should be an 

 idealised model upon a small scale. It should con- 

 cern itself with the tragedies of undeveloped talent, 

 the slow decay of the faculties of masses of men 

 caused by their employment in industry, and the sullen 

 mental stupor that, after the violent revolutionary 

 period of youth, brings peace on an animal level. For 

 the schools are concerned with similar problems. 

 The elevation of the submerged, the bringing back 

 into the stream of school-life of the weak, and the 

 raising of the general average are even more important 

 there than the provision of the fullest opportunity for 

 talent and ability. So is it in the national life. We 

 are presented with a vision of spacious halls and 

 galleries, workshops, laboratories, gardens and fields, 

 art-rooms, libraries, and museums for children to 

 learn in instead of in stuffy class-rooms, by doing, 

 making, inquiring, and co-operating rather than by 

 the preparation for interminable examinations, which 

 suit better those of the possessive and dominating 

 order, of whom the world is growing so tired. 



The policy of leaving dull, bread-winning drudgery 

 unredeemed in the state it is, and concentrating upon 

 the cultivation of the artistic and literary faculties of 

 the workers in enlarged periods of leisure, can only 

 have the effect of making the real work even more 

 impossible. In spite of the cold douche of authority, 

 we are told; in spite of the attitude of labour-leaders, 

 once bit twice shy ; and in spite of the enthusiasm 

 ever seeking a new rallying ground for lost causes, 

 workers, when they are left to themselves to plan 

 their own scheme of salvation, choose for their educa- 

 tion vocational and technical work. The average 

 man glories in his daily work and trade so long as his 

 heart is kept in it by his being treated as a human 

 being rather than as a machine. In the spirit of 

 craftsmanship, better than in medieval and drawing- 

 room studies, is to be found the remedy for the evils 

 of industrialism. 



Science, the gift of the age, notwithstanding its 

 repercussion upon the foundations of society, has 

 not yet penetrated appreciably into our institutions of 

 governance and education. It is the bed-rock upon 

 which all future educational ideals must be based, 

 and the new creative spirit it has reincarnated in the 

 world — its spirit of inquiry for the love of truth for 

 its own sake and its spirit of co-operation with 

 others engaged in the same work — is that by which 

 the age must outgrow the nightmare which the old 

 spirit has made of it and the world. Scientific 

 tnought and research must be applied to creating new 

 wine-skins rather than more new wine until this is 

 put right. It has demolished the cobwebs of tradi- 

 tional economics and finance and substituted for them 

 fundamental conceptions of the laws by which men 

 live and move and have their being. It meets no 



NO" 2644, VOL. 105] 



opposition, and scarcely even discussion, now from 

 the professional exponents of the merits of the exist- 

 ing regime. Were it not for private interests and the 

 ignorance of its ruling classes science would not 

 have any difficulty in restarting the world on saner 

 lines. 



What is especially remarkable about this is that it 

 is no vision of a dreamer, " sicklied o'er with the 

 pale cast of thought," but rather that of a practical 

 public-school headmaster, who has burst open the 

 prison-doors of the pedagogic strongholds of the past 

 and reclaimed for the schools the right and duty of 

 serving and studying ' their own age. If there were 

 ten such men, haply they might yet be in time. 



This picture from a schoolmaster of what could be 

 done in the school opens out broader visions of what 

 universities might accomplish. They are in the most 

 extraordinary case. They can claim that thev have 

 given in the research ideal of science— the finding 

 out of the fundamentally new, not the mere redis- 

 covery of the old that has been lost— the creative 

 agency by which alone the modern world is great or 

 even distinguished. But it has been done in the teeth 

 of official apathy and discouragement. On the other 

 side of the balance sheet is the traditional education 

 they continue to give to the ruling classes, training 

 them to be impervious to new knowledge and able 

 only to find in the old and dead past ideals for imita- 

 tion and reverence. These ideals and maxims have 

 set the producers of wealth of the modern world at 

 one another's throats for the benefit of its wasters. 

 The code of laws remains as in olden time, though 

 its obvious result has been to turn to debt the increase 

 in the wealth of the community which the labours of 

 scientific investigators have made possible. The 

 world despises such results and wants something more 

 from its old universities than that they should be 

 beggars for their existence for crumbs from the tables 

 that its own schools of science have loaded with gifts. 

 It looks to them for a clear enunciation of the first 

 right of the community to the produce of its own 

 labours, which the law allows by taxation, for the up- 

 bringing of its own youth and for the cultivation of it? 

 creative institutions where knowledge is made and 

 disseminated. The claim of the usurer upon that 

 produce is secondary both bv law and bv common 

 sense. And, lest again the stability of the world be 

 endangered by its rulers being educated on mvth and 

 verbal subtleties to the total exclusion of the laws 

 that appertain equally to Nature and to life, let them 

 in the spirit of Plato inscribe over their reformed 

 portals : — 



"Let no one enter who is destitute of science." 

 Frederick Soddy. 



British Aeronautics.^ 



'T'HE Report of the Advisory Committee for Aero- 

 ■•■ nautics for the year 1918-19 is an interesting 

 record of work achieved, which acquires additional 

 interest by including a general review of progress 

 made since the beginning of the war. More than ever, 

 after reading it, one is impressed by the range and 

 extent of the demands which this new industry has 

 made upon existing knowledge ; of the structural 

 engineer it requires that its stress calculations and 

 the testing of its materials shall be conducted with 

 an accuracy never contemplated before ; of the 

 mechanical engineer, that its engines shall be 

 economical both of material and of ifuel to a degree 

 which until very recently would have seemed almost 



1 " Aeronautics." Report of the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics for 

 the Yenr 1018-19. Pp. 77. (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1930.) 

 Cmd. 488. Price 4//. net. 



