THE ELEMENTS OF RECONSTRUCTION (eBook)

H. G. Wells (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
355 Seiten
Musaicum Books (Verlag)
9788027235537 (ISBN)

Infos

In H. G. Wells' 'The Elements of Reconstruction', the author envisions a utopian society where scientific advancements play a crucial role in rebuilding a world ravaged by war. Through a combination of speculative fiction and social commentary, Wells explores the potential of technology to shape a more equitable future. Written in a clear and engaging style, the book serves as a call to action for readers to consider the power of progress in creating a better world. Wells' imaginative storytelling and keen observations on human nature make this work a thought-provoking read for those interested in both science fiction and social reform. The novel is a testament to Wells' belief in the transformative potential of science and his vision for a more enlightened society. 'The Elements of Reconstruction' is a timely reminder of the importance of embracing new ideas and technologies to address the challenges of the modern world, making it a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of science, society, and progress.

Textauszug

I. — SCIENCE IN EDUCATION AND INDUSTRY

Table of Contents

 

SCIENCE AND THE PUBLIC SERVICES

THE GREAT DYE QUESTION

OUR OLD ECONOMIC SYSTEM

RESEARCH AMALGAMATED WITH INDUSTRY

IN a recent conversation between two friends the complaint was made that there existed no clear and systematic national plan or policy for the development of the Empire after the war. This complaint was discussed, and both friends concluded at last that it was unfounded, that there did exist—though too often expressed in a fragmentary way and much obscured by personal and party questions— a clear and simple course before the country. The two friends attempted a plain statement of this course, and came to a very complete agreement upon it. Their attempt seemed so to clear up their own ideas that they think the results may appeal to a wider circle. They have ventured to compress them into some three or four letters (in which it may be noted two hands are engaged), believing that what they will have to say will outline a complete and consistent liberal and progressive policy in British affairs. They find they can approach the whole matter most conveniently by coming into it in reference to the recent discussion of the national neglect of science.

For the last quarter of a century one of these writers has been interested in the movement for the development of science teaching and scientific research in this country. He has been equally impressed by the excellence and by the futility of the criticisms levelled at our higher educational organization, from the days of Matthew Arnold to the recent gathering in the rooms of the Linnean Society, when, under appropriately asphyxiating conditions, witness after witness testified to the suffocation of science in British affairs, to waste, disastrous ignorance, and murderous indifference to knowledge in our administration, and to our planless future. The figure of Sir Ray Lankester still haunts his memory. Sir Ray, with a corrugated brow and troubled eyes, asking in a kind of perplexed whisper what it was held us back, why, with so overwhelming a case against neglect, with such instances and proofs, in these days of tragic and bitter demonstration, we still even now were not getting on to any real expansion either of scientific education or of the organization of research.

SCIENCE AND THE PUBLIC SERVICES

Sir Ray Lankester’s answer to his own question was to attack the Civil Service Commissioners. They have a bias in favour of the old classical education, and they load the scales against science by overmarking Greek and Latin subjects and undermarking science. In practice this closes the big public services to the science student. Clever and ambitious boys are drawn over to the classical side; they acquire an ‘anti-modern side’ habit of mind and a certain contempt for the modern side residuum. The science of the country suffers doubly—first, because the abler and administrative men are unscientific and ignorant of science; and, secondly, because science does not get the pick of our young men. The case of the scientific men for an immediate scaling up of the marks given for science in the Civil Service requirements is overwhelming and unanswerable. Nothing that is written here is to be taken as detracting from the urgency of that demand.

Nevertheless it is arguable that obstruction by the friends of the old-fashioned education among the Civil Service Commissioners does not exhaust the account of the forces that blockade science from this country. The diagnosis of our scientific congestion, our scientific atrophy, may be carried farther. The question may be a much wider one than it is generally supposed to be. The British neglect of science may be not a specific trouble in itself, but a symptom of some much decider and more general trouble. It is possible that in attacking classical dons. University prejudices. Convocation clerics, scholastic stupidity, national apathy about science, journalistic ignorance, and so on and so on, the scientific progressive has been attacking on too narrow a front and at the wrong point in the front. It is conceivable that British education will never be extensively altered in this way; the experience of a quarter of a century at least points to that conclusion. It is conceivable that the educational problem is not a problem-in-itself at all, and that when we begin to regard it as a part in a much larger problem, as part of the general problem of national reconstruction, we shall find that, instead of our difficulties being increased by this enlargement of purview, they will be found to vanish away.

This, at any rate, is the thesis now presented. It is submitted that the problem of national education and the problem of economic reconstruction are inseparable and cannot be dealt with apart. They must be part of one plan, the national plan. What other problems may also enter into this plan may be deferred for a later date. The present thesis is quite enough for this opening discussion.

THE GREAT DYE QUESTION

Everybody is familiar at the present time with what we may call the instance of the dyes, the great dye question. That may serve very well as our type case. What is true of the dyes will be found with a rough parallelism to be true of metallurgy, engineering, the electrical industry, and so on. The story of the dyes as it is usually told is the story of a British discovery exploited by Germany because Germany was developing and was able to get to work at once with a large class of properly trained mediocre chemical investigators, while Britain had no such class available. At a comparatively trivial amount spent upon scientific education Germany captured an industry not merely worth twenty million and more a year to her, but giving her, as we now discover, remarkable military and political advantages. So far we endorse the story. But then comes the implication that had Britain laid down, as one lays down wine, a few thousand chemical students in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties to mature, at a cost, let us say, of a thousand pounds a head or so, nothing of the sort would have happened, and that all that we have now to do after the war is just to set aside an annual million earmarked ‘chemists,’ and then all these arrears will be made up to us.

But, indeed, the business is not so simple as that. We submit that it has been practically impossible for Britain to produce that class of technical chemists up to the present time, that no subsidizing of education, however generous, would have enabled her to do so, and that without changes far more extensive than a mere endowment of technical universities and colleges she will still be unable to produce it.

There comes in at this point something which is generally spoken of as the apathy of the British manufacturer. Everyone has heard of his remarkable refusal to employ technical chemists and scientific experts, even such few as we had. And everybody has heard of those wonderful German firms that keep one hundred, three hundred, six hundred industrial chemists constantly at work. From that the narrator proceeds to vehement abuse of the conservative British employer, whose only ambition is to be mistaken for a country gentleman, who lives by his grandfather’s routines, deserts the works for an estate, shoots pheasants, and so on and so on. We are all familiar with the shrill indictment, the popular novelist-reformer is for ever at it. The ‘apathetic’ manufacturer shares with the ‘clerical headmaster’ his acutest indignation. Such social criticisms brighten life, but they fail altogether to exhaust this problem.

OUR OLD ECONOMIC SYSTEM

Indeed, they scarcely touch it. Even if the British manufacturer lived always in his shirt-sleeves and never washed his hands, and kept a torn-out page of a chemical text-book pinned above his shaving-glass, he would still not be in a position to employ a large staff of technical chemists. He cannot do so because his business and his plant are not upon a scale that permits that sort of thing. In that lies the gist of this matter. The British economic system developed some generations before the German did, before electricity, and concurrently with the railways; it is older, it is more old-fashioned, its parts are upon a different scale. America and Germany have developed the present economic system upon that larger scale which the enormous development of means and rapidity of communications in the nineteenth century have made possible. Britain was doing very well on the older scale. Necessarily one must state things crudely, but the broad fact in the business issue between Britain and Germany during the last quarter-century is that Britain has been a country of a great number of little hundred-thousand-pound businesses, so to speak, with a tradition of mutual competition, with, indeed, competition preached as a gospel, and Germany has been a country of fewer and co-operating five-million businesses and combines. All sorts of consequences follow from that essential structural difference in the two systems, but the only one that concerns us now is in its relation to the industrial application of science.

It is one of the commonest delusions of unwary minds that things can be reduced to scale and still remain the same sort of things. But for most practical purposes that is not the case; you cannot reduce a house to scale, for example, because of the doors and windows, and our legislative amateurs in popular economy will probably discover in a year or so that the psychology of investing five shillings is not at all the same...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.12.2017
• Verlagsort: Prague
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Schulbuch / Wörterbuch ► Lernhilfen ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Schlagworte: A Death in the Family • Agricultural Innovation • Educational Texts • education reform • Gabriel García Márquez • Hemingway • Historical Analysis • Imperial Politics • Jack London • Jane Austen • Labour relations • One Day in My Life • on the road • Paolo Coelho • Political Science • progressive thinking • science fiction writer • Social commentary • Sons and Lovers • Swann's Way
• ISBN-13: 9788027235537 / 9788027235537