The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 9

period were already familiar with warfare. Early sculptors from the Sumerian cities and from pre-dynastic Egypt show us disciplined fighting men. War became an integral part of the social tradition. Conquest and the interplay of the warrior and priestly tradition supply the main themes of recorded history.

In Book 4 (Chap. 8, § 3) we discussed the evolution through natural selection within a species of structures and habits inimical to the species as a whole, but giving an advantage to the particular individual over his fellows. Such are many conspicuous sexual colours and noises, enormous antlers, exaggerated size and the like. The warmaking disposition seems in many cases to have been a variation of this sort, which gave particular human tribes and communities a distinctive or dominating advantage over more peaceful societies. In the past, wars and conquests have no doubt done much to accelerate human progress by breaking up tradition-systems that threatened to become rigid and facilitating the establishment of larger and more efficient unities, but that was a phase out of which we have passed, and there can be little question now of the biological disadvantage which rests upon our species through its present preoccupation with war and war organization. War prefers the healthier and more vigorous males for possible destruction at an age when the chances are against their having produced offspring ; it misdirects and wastes a grave proportion of the none-too-ample directive and organizing ability of mankind, and its consumption of material resources even during that preparatory phase which we dignify with the name of “ peace’ is disastrous.

Inseparably associated with the habitual idea of war as a normal feature in life is the idea of the independent competitive sovereign state.

The picture of the universe in the minds of a vast majority of men and women is distorted by this idea of a necessary hostility to foreigners and the fear of any relaxation of the disciplines of the state to which they are devoted makes them obstruct every effort to release the new generation from its obsession with belligerent ideas. For many people who are adult and set, such ideas have become incurably a part of the mental structure. ‘They cannot think of political and social questions except in patriotic forms. Yet the independent sovereign state tradition, which is really inseparable from

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THE SCIENGE OF LIFE

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and in part identical with the war tradition, cripples education at the present time, limits human freedom, hinders the development of a sane conservation and exploitation of the economic resources of the world, and is altogether so patently evil that it is impossible to believe that it will maintain itself for many more generations against the accumulating commonsense of mankind. A great cultural effort is certainly necessary, and a thousand intricate problems of tactics and strategy must be solved before human education can be turned away from its traditional prejudices, but the experiences of the last hundred years of release and restatement give good grounds for confidence that the thing may be done.

§ 4 The Change in the Nature of Education

We have said that man, like many of the higher mammals and much more than any of the others, is an educational animal. But education for him, as for them, has been until quite recent times the imparting of tradition, the building up of his systems of association upon traditional lines. In education the human young learnt the wisdom of its forefathers. Education was an entirely conservative force ; it functioned to preserve the traditional state of affairs. So it is still over large parts of the world. So it is whereever it is under the direction of religious bodies who maintain a view of the universe which they believe to be final. So it is in the completely self-satisfied atmosphere of a typical English public school. But in quite a little space of years the conception of education in many progressive minds has undergone the most revolutionary developments. The introduction of scientific work has infected even the most dogmatic centres with a sense of intellectual incompleteness. Even the most traditional education glances now ever and again, almost unwittingly, towards the future. Instead of “ forming minds’? and ‘‘ moulding character’? to a certain pattern fitted to a definite rdéle and then turning out the completed product to astonish the world, the educational machinery of to-day begins at least to think of its function as a preparation for adventure, experiment and learning that will continue throughout life.

Education, from the modern point of view, consists of four chief factors. ‘There is, one, the training of all the individual faculties to as high a level as possible, speech, drawing, the full use of hands and body generally ;