by H. G. Wells
only the last decadent phase of his educational career.
The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the
world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness
and generosity. Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive,
more or less completely digested into the Board of Education.
The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how
many of the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and
early manhood have given place now to more scientific and efficient
machinery. When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was
ruled by a strange body called a Local Board-it was the Age of
Boards-and I still remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the
breakfast-table over the liberation of London from the corrupt and
devastating control of a Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there
were also School Boards; I was already practically in politics
before the London School Board was absorbed by the spreading
tentacles of the London County Council.
It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State
to remember that the very beginnings of public education lie within
my father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic
people were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of
the sort. When he was born, totally illiterate people who could
neither read a book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature,
were to be found everywhere in England; and great masses of the
population were getting no instruction at all. Only a few schools
flourished upon the patronage of exceptional parents; all over the
country the old endowed grammar schools were to be found sinking and
dwindling; many of them had closed altogether. In the new great
centres of population multitudes of children were sweated in the
factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and the under-equipped and
under-staffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary
contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight
against this festering darkness. It was a condition of affairs
clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount of
indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were
possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian
will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the
commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian
enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.
I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social
institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they
should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust
of government in the Victorian days was far too great, and the
general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go about
the new business it was taking up in a businesslike way, to train
teachers, build and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and
provide properly written school-books. These things it was felt
MUST be provided by individual and local effort, and since it was
manifest that it was individual and local effort that were in
default, it was reluctantly agreed to stimulate them by money
payments. The State set up a machinery of examination both in
Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and payments, known
technically as grants, were made in accordance with the examination
results attained, to such schools as Providence might see fit to
send into the world. In this way it was felt the Demand would be
established that would, according to the beliefs of that time,
inevitably ensure the Supply. An industry of "Grant earning" was
created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.
In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but Grant-
earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy. So far
as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the
task of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the
most part quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also
were teaching similar classes to those they examined, it was feared
that injustice might be done. Year after year these eminent persons
set questions and employed subordinates to read and mark the
increasing thousands of answers that ensued, and having no doubt the
national ideal of fairness well developed in their minds, they were
careful each year to re-read the preceding papers before composing
the current one, in order to see what it was usual to ask. As a
result of this, in the course of a few years the recurrence and
permutation of questions became almost calculable, and since the
practical object of the teaching was to teach people not science,
but how to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grant-
earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any kind of genuine
education whatever.
Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of
the age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science
prevalent at this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by
making graduates in arts and priests in the established church
Science Teachers EX OFFICIO, and leaving local and private
enterprise to provide schools, diagrams, books, material, according
to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in the district. Private
enterprise made a particularly good thing of the books. A number of
competing firms of publishers sprang into existence specialising in
Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to produce
text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of
knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty
subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and
models and instructions that should give precisely the method and
gestures esteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book
was written in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the
examiners, and test questions extracted from papers set in former
years were appended to every chapter. By means of these last the
teacher was able to train his class to the very highest level of
grant-earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all other
methods of exposition aside. First he posed his pupils with
questions and then dictated model replies.
That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes
as an elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death,
and it is so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table,
smothering a yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible
formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of
desks before him. Occasionally be would slide to his feet and go to
a blackboard on an easel and draw on that very slowly and
deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the class to copy in
coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a specimen or
arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in the Institute in
which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of apparatus
<
br /> prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by the
Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with
maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.
But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in
systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to
pieces. He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it,
because in the first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen
burner and good material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second
they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger
the apparatus of the Institute and even the lives of his students.
Then thirdly, real experiments involved washing up. And moreover
they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant
learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies. Quite
early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the
unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is
fixed between systematic science and elusive fact. I knew, for
example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic
Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow into a
glass of lime water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue
to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into the
stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face
and painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all. And
I knew, too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a
retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and
may be collected over water, whereas in real life if you do anything
of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium
chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says
"Oh! Damn!" with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady
student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.
Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite
understand that ancient libertine refusing to cooperate in her own
undoing. And I can quite understand, too, my father's preference
for what he called an illustrative experiment, which was simply an
arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with nothing
whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool,
and then a slow luminous description of just what you did put in it
when you were so ill-advised as to carry the affair beyond
illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you
did. He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in
this way he could make us see all he described. The class, freed
from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life
without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then
my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be
copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard any
exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as
"empyreumatic" or "botryoidal."
Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I remember once
sticking up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description,
"Please, sir, what is flocculent?"
"The precipitate is."
"Yes, sir, but what does it mean?"
"Oh! flocculent! " said my father, "flocculent! Why-" he extended
his hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air.
"Like that," he said.
I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment
after giving it. "As in a flock bed, you know," he added and
resumed his discourse.
3
My father, Iam afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical
affairs to an exceptionally high level. He combined practical
incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine
temperament, in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any
human being. He was always trying to do new things in the briskest
manner, under the suggestion of books or papers or his own
spontaneous imagination, and as he had never been trained to do
anything whatever in his life properly, his futilities were
extensive and thorough. At one time he nearly gave up his classes
for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its possibilities; the
peculiar pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a chemical
theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory memories for a lifetime.
The intensive culture phase is very clear in my memory; it came near
the end of his career and when I was between eleven and twelve. I
was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions, and
assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that
wrecked my preparation work for school next day. My father dug up
both lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour
alternating with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And
for weeks he talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every
meal.
A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a
thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to he watched; it does
not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its
own. Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to
trouble mankind; it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged
and demoralised and over-irritated garden. My father got at cross
purposes with our two patches at an early stage. Everything grew
wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified
nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse. The
peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the
beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a
spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for
being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the
catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your
cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane with its
occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme,
because my father always stopped work and went indoors if any one
watched him. His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome
spirit of inquiry in hardy natures.
In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding
string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the
consequent obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he
erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and
never finished by which everything was to be watered at once by
means of pieces of gutter from the roof and outhouses of Number 2,
and a large and particularly obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the
abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely either by axe
or by fire, combined to give the gardens under intensive culture a
singularly desolate and disorderly appearance. He took steps
towards the diversion of our house drain under the influence of the
Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped in time. He
hardly completed any of the operations he began; something else
became more urgent or simply he tir
ed; a considerable area of the
Number 2 territory was never even dug up.
In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. Never was a
man less horticulturally-minded. The clamour of these vegetables he
had launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out
his patience. He would walk into the garden the happiest of men
after a day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or
social organisation, or summarising some book he had read. He
talked to me of anything that interested him, regardless of my
limitations. Then he would begin to note the growth of the weeds.
"This won't do," he would say and pull up a handful.
More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary.
His hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off
in his careless grip, leaving the roots behind. The world would
darken. He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment.
"CURSE these weeds!" he would say from his heart. His discourse was
at an end.
I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the
tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively
enriched. He would come in like a whirlwind. "This damned stuff
all over me and the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah!
AAAAAAH!"
My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing
on such occasions. She would remain standing a little stiffly in
the scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he
sought.
"If you say such things-"
He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. "The towel!" he
would cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; "the
towel! I'll let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the
towel! I'll give up everything, I tell you-everything!"…
At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I
was in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it
happened. I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still
echoes in my brain, shouting his opinion of intensive culture for
all the world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery
of a crop with a hoe. We had tied them up with bast only a week or
so before, and now half were rotten and half had shot up into tall
slender growths. He had the hoe in both hands and slogged. Great