248 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



at Grade D and how natural it was to extend my diagram to two more 

 grades and make it a diagram of the whole knowledge organisation of a 

 modern community. Here then is Grade E, the adult learning that goes 

 on now right through life, keeping oneself up 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 to-day. 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 news- 

 papers and teachers, though there has still to be a lot of that, but as a worker 

 with initiative, making experiments, learning from new experience, an 

 industrialist, an artist, an original writer, a responsible lawyer, an adminis- 

 trator, 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 this flight of arrows, the rich 

 results of the work of Grade F flowing into a central world-encyclopaedic- 

 organisation, where it will be continually summarised, clarified, and whence 

 it will be distributed through the general information channels of the world. 

 So I complete my general scheme of the knowledge organisation of a 

 modern community and submit it to you for your consideration. 



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 ^8,000,000, 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 drooling along 

 very much as they were drooling along 37 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 Organisa- 

 tion 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 40 weeks — for 10 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 educa- 

 tion 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. 



