L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 245 



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 inter- 

 pretations they will encounter. We hush it up until they are in the thick 

 of it. 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. 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, 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 ac- 

 quaintance 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 avail- 

 able about the conventions of property and money. Upon these con- 

 ventions human property stands, 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 

 generalisations about human behaviour, 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 how its fluctuations in 



