ABSTRACT
EDUCATORS need to make a careful survey of their aims and methods in these days of deep change and criticism. There has recently been far too much preparation of human fodder for the industrial machine, with the disastrous results we have had to suffer in the terrible years 1914-19. Even now in our impoverishment, the cry often is for accelerating that dangerous machine, in order to pay war debts, and for shaping education so that it may provide that fodder ever more quickly and efficiently. Technical education there must be, and we must all support its just claims, but we shall be wiser if we look beyond the working of the industrial machine and try to build up future citizens of humanity who will have some preparation to appreciate the diversity of problems, of opportunities, of governmental and of social needs among their fellow-men the world over. This implies the need for spreading right through the population an educational preparation that will furnish a growing and broadening interpretation of the modern world with all its rich variety of effort and achievement, of contributions to human life, of difficulties in the maintenance of society. Humanists have been far too much inclined to take man as man for granted, and this has inevitably led not only teachers, but also statesmen and philosophers, to a view of all mankind in a procession struggling up one and the same ladder with our particular nation, whether we are British or German or American or French or what not, at the head of the procession. Peoples differing from ourselves are esteemed to be backward in some way or other. It is thought to be our duty either to force or to wheedle them, at whatever pace we can manage, towards the light. We have surely realized the self-prejudice that vitiates this point of view, and we must see to it that the problems of mankind are studied with less and less of that prejudice and a more ardent desire for the whole truth, towards the attainment of which not only logic, but also sympathy must bring its tribute. To that better education, it is claimed that Geography can contribute in a very special way. While it was necessarily out of focus in the educational schemes of the generation of industrial preliminaries of the war, it must play its part in education and research for more comprehensive truth, and it has a part that nothing else can play for it.
