Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions, great or small
There's a lot more system here than you suspect
If I was the hot-tempered old autocrat some of you people pretend I am, I should have been tickling you up with a thunderbolt long ago. But I happen to have this democratic fad as badly as any one – Free Will is what they used to call it – and so I leave you to work out your own salvation. [...] Don’t blame me. There isn’t a thing in the whole of this concern of mine that Man can’t control if only he chooses to control it. It’s arranged like that. There’s a lot more system here than you suspect, only it’s too ingenious for you to see. It’s yours to command. If you want a card index for the world – well, get a card index. I won’t prevent you. If you don’t like my spiders, kill my spiders. I’m not conceited about them… Why don’t you abolish Kings? You could. But it was your sort, with your cheap and quick efficiency schemes, who set up Saul – in spite of my protests – ages ago… Humanity either makes or breeds or tolerates all its own afflictions, great and small. Not my doing… Take dungheaps and flies. It’s astonishing you people haven’t killed off all the flies in the world long ago. They do no end of mischief, and it would be perfectly easy to do. They’re purely educational. Purely. Even as you lie in hospital, there they are buzzing within an inch of your nose and landing on your poor forehead to remind you of what a properly organized humanity could do for its own comfort. But there’s men in this world who want me to act as a fly-paper, simply because they are too lazy to get one for themselves… if people haven’t taught you properly, teach yourself. If they don’t know enough, find out. It’s all here.”
by H. G. Wells(21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946)
from Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education
Joan and Peter Graduate
image – sherrattsam
Inner Voices
This is the voice of Lord God, speaking with a young man named Peter. Peter is probably delirious, under anesthetic after an operation: he’s survived being worsted in a dogfight with a WWI German flying ace.
I took a wander through reviews of Joan and Peter, from when the book was first published. They sometimes talk about educational reform – the belief that both English and American education were in a period of important change. The world had become too complex for the third grade reading, writing and arithmetic that the average person took home from basic schooling. Some acknowledged that we were caught between an unease about our isolation from other cultures, and nostalgia for the insular self-involvement before WWI. Though it was a little early for the slogan “question authority,” women’s suffrage was picking up steam.
In Joan and Peter, Wells creates two orphans, Joan and Peter, and follows them through this changing landscape.
…a colonial administrator, Oswald, comes back from his work in Africa full of zeal for the mission of the British Empire as an agent of civilization and eager for the training of men competent to meet such responsibilities. He finds himself made the guardian of an orphan boy and girl and sets out to find schools and colleges for them in accordance with his ideas of what education is needed by the modern world. But he can find none in all England. The old schools are snobbish and conservative, the new schools are faddish and pretentious.
“The New Books”
The Independent/ Harper’s Weekly
Vol. 96, No. 3644
Nov 8, 1918
pg 182
