240 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



two hundred 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 ignorant, unbalanced, un- 

 critical minds, at once suspicious and credulous, weakly gregarious, 

 easily baffled and easily 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 — what- 

 ever 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 

 2,400 hours. You will perceive 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 to-day are not 

 equal to the task required of them, then we have to recondition our 

 teachers or 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. 



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. This is what 

 it wants to know. In all these educational matters, there is an element 

 of overlap. As it learns about things and their relationship and inter- 

 action 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 realisation 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 difl^erent from what it is to-day 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 from the 

 persuasion that history is a magic recital beginning ' William the Con- 

 queror, 1066.' Concurrently, we ought to make the weather and the mud 



