by John Fowles
67 Everywhere we see the need for change; and in so few places the satisfaction of that need. I come now to the vital factor. It is education.
9
A NEW EDUCATION
1 At present almost all our education is directed to two ends: to get wealth for the state and to gain a livelihood for the individual. It is therefore little wonder that society is money-obsessed, since the whole tenor of education seems to indicate that this obsession is both normal and desirable.
2 In spite of the fact that we now have almost universal education, we are qualitatively one of the least-educated ages, precisely because education has everywhere surrendered to economic need. Relatively far better educations were received by the fortunate few in the eighteenth century; in the Renaissance; in ancient Rome and Greece. The aims of education in all those periods were far superior to our own* they opened the student admirably to the understanding and enjoyment of life and to his responsibilities tot wards society. Of course the facts and subjects of the old classical education are largely unnecessary to us today; and of course it was the product of a highly unjust economic situation, but at its best it arrived at something none of our present systems remotely approach: the rounded human being.
3 There should be four main aims in a good education. The first is the one that pre-empts all present systems: the training of the pupil for an economic role in society. The second is teaching the nature of society and the human polity. The third is teaching the richness of existence. And the fourth is the establishment of that sense of relative recompense which man, in contrast to the other orders of animate life, has so long lost. In simpler terms, we need to fit the students for a livelihood, then for living among other human beings, then for enjoying his own life, and finally for comprehending the purpose (and ultimately, the justice) of existence in human form.
4 Now there are two important distinctions between the first and the latter three of these aims. From the point of view of the state they are to a certain extent hostile. The economy does not want too much attention paid by its workers to social purpose, self-enjoyment and the ultimate nature of existence; it needs intelligent and obedient cogs, not intelligent and independent individuals. And since the state always has a very large say in the nature of the educational system, we can expect little desire for change from politicians and administrators.
5 The second distinction is this: whereas the first economic-role type of education will plainly vary with the economic needs of the nation, and so legitimately vary from country to country, the latter three purposes hardly vary at all, since we are all in the same human situation and endowed with the same senses. In these three fields virtually the same education could be taught all over the world; and should be taught. But this again represents a threat to the identity of the state; and is a second reason why its Servants’ can be expected to oppose any introduction of a universally similar syllabus.
6 Now it may be argued that the best of our universities, at least in the richer and culturally more advanced countries, already provide such an education. Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, the great new Californian universities, the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale, and similar prestigious centres of learning certainly provide a richness of culture where a student can achieve those further three aims if he has the inclination and can find the time. But even here the overriding factor is the examination system. It is only in very recent times that the chief function of a university (or school of any kind) has been taken to be the grading of its students by examination. We know why this is so: to ensure that the most deserving students get the places available. But this immediately reveals the examination system for what it is: a desperate expedient, exactly analogous to rationing food in wartime, in a desperate situation.
7 All the evils of history are attributable to a shortage of schools. And the shortage of schools in our own time is the most desperate in the history of man. The more equality we want, the more education we want; the more means of communication, the more we see the want; the more leisure we gain, the more we need to be taught to use it; and the more populations grow, the more schools they will demand.
8 Each age has a special risk. Ours is letting half the world starve literally and nine-tenths of it starve educationally. No species can afford to be ignorant. The only world in which it could allow itself such a luxury is one in which it had no enemies and had risen above hazard and evolution.
A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
9 Before we can approach the concept of a universal education, we have to consider that of a universal language. Teaching is above all communication, and communication is impossible unless there is a generally understood medium. We therefore need a language that may be taught as a universal second tongue.
10 It is absolutely clear that the attempts to create such a language artificially (Esperanto, Ido and the rest) have failed. Their inventors’ perhaps worthy desire to satisfy national pride by running together disparate elements from different languages leads them all into an absurd impracticability, since one thus destroys any hope of providing teachers who speak the language naturally; there is no existing and tried model to refer to for new developments and resources; and perhaps worst of all, these pseudo-languages can offer no literature.
11 There are four requisites of a universal language:
1. It should be based on an already existing major language.
2. It should be analytic, not synthetic. (Synthetic languages are those that incorporate signs as to meaning and syntactical function inside each word – that is, they have genders, case systems, a widely variable word order; analytic languages have fewer such features and depend far more on a rigorous word order.)
3. It should have a phonetic spelling system based on a limited number of symbols.
4. It should be able to provide an effective simple or basic mode of communication and a fertile and adaptable more complex one.
12 We may at once rule out the numerically most spoken language: Chinese. Its reading symbols are hopelessly unlimited; its pronunciation is tonal (meaning may depend on musical pitch); it is highly dialectal; and it is semantically, as every translator of Chinese poetry knows, bewilderingly imprecise.
13 With one exception all the principal European languages, whether Romance, Teutonic or Slavonic in origin, retain too many synthetic features in syntax and declension. The same is true of Arabic. However interesting and evocative gender-systems and complex verb and noun forms may be in a literary sense, philologically they are redundant. No one designing a new language with ease of learning and functional utility in mind would for a moment retain them.
14 This leads to the inescapable conclusion that the most suitable candidate is English. It is already the de facto second language of the world; and every teacher of languages knows that this is because it is the least synthetic of the major tongues and therefore the easiest to learn. If we British and Americans suppose that it has gained its ubiquity simply because of our past and present political power we are much mistaken. Foreigners increasingly speak English because it is the best tool available; not because they love or admire us.
15 Its advantages are considerable. It is numerically the second most spoken (as a mother-tongue) language of the world, and the most widely spoken by non-native speakers. Its dialects, unlike those of Chinese, are largely intercomprehensible. It has a rich literature, both historical and contemporary; and it has rich resources and a facility for new development. Its alphabet is simple. And it is very well suited to both simple and complex modes of expression.
16 It has, of course, disadvantages. Its spelling is (compared to a language like Italian) very far from phonetic. It does retain some synthetic features, including some annoying irregularities in declension. In some of its spoken forms (such as British English) it becomes almost a tonal language, full of subtle nuances of meaning dependent on minute (for a foreigner) changes of stress. Its richness of vocabulary – two or three times more words than most other European
languages – also creates problems of usage.
17 But the adaptations required are not too forbidding or if they are so, only to those of us for whom English is the mother-tongue. The most urgent need is for a phonetic spelling system (which would of course do something far more important than facilitate spelling: is would aid pronunciation). No one has ever fully answered Bernard Shaw’s arguments for this step. The rationalization of the present alphabet is a small price to pay for the vastly increased utility it would give to the language.
18 The second field for improvement lies in the regularization of exceptions in declension and syntax. This is a far more difficult problem, especially as so many of the exceptions he among very common words. One has only to regularize a sentence like ‘I saw the men working hard’ into ‘I seed the mans working hardly’ to realize the pitfalls. Nonetheless there are many declensional sore thumbs that could be remedied without fear of ambiguity.
19 Language is a tool, the most important that man has. We ‘should allow nothing – neither the prejudice of the linguistic chauvinists nor our (if we are English) distaste for barbaric-sounding innovations in our language – to stand in the way of a unilingual world. This is in a sense an English-speakers’ responsibility. We should perfect the tool for the special function. All the evidence is that the rest of the world will happily learn to use it.
THE THREE FURTHER AIMS OF EDUCATION
20 Education is the most vital of all social activities and therefore the most eagerly abused by the contemporary power-system – whether that system is religious, as in the Middle Ages, or political-economic, as for the last century or so. It has in fact been tyrannized since the rise of the great religions in the first millennium. In many ways the educational theories of the ancients are more modern – less corrupted by political and economic need – than any that have been evolved since, and the three further aims of education I propose are not mine. They were laid down in the third century after Christ by the great Neo-Platonist philosopher, Plotinus. He required an outward education – civil and social; an inward one – personal and self-revealing; and finally a synoptic education that would allow the student to grasp, or at least glimpse, the complex whole of human existence. This is not the place to develop in any detail the scheme of such a triple education in humanity; but some general needs and problems must be dealt with. The first and most practical difficulty in establishing a world-wide syllabus in humanity is only too clearly nationalism.
NATIONALISM
21 Nationalism is a cheap instinct and a dangerous tool. Take away from any country what it owes to other countries; and then be proud of it if you can.
22 In a poor country, patriotism is to believe that one’s country would be the best if it were rich and powerful. In a rich one, patriotism is to believe that one’s country is the best because it is rich and powerful. So patriotism becomes the desire to get what others have or to keep others from getting what one has. In short, it is an aspect of conservatism; of animal envy and animal selfishness.
23 The significant truth is not that you are lucky to have been born into one of the best – the richest or most powerful – countries; but that others are unlucky not to have been born into it. You are not a starving Indian peasant, but you might have been. That you are not is not a matter for self-congratulation, but one for charitable action, for concern. The proper domain for nationalism is art and culture; not politics.
24 Men were one in a tribe, one in a city, were one in a church, in a political party. But now they are becoming a world of isolated ones. The old bonds dissolve; the bonds of the race, of the shared language, of the shared rites, of the shared history. This is good. We disintegrate now to integrate in the only good unity: a one humanity.
25 An education in humanity must inculcate a oneness of situation in each mind in each land: a common predicament and a common existence, a common right to recompense, and a common justification and justice. It must therefore teach children to see the faults in society; by teaching them for nationalistic reasons to pretend that bad things are good, we teach them to teach the same. A bad lesson has a long life.
26 What the state or the system considers a good teacher and what is a good teacher are always two different things. A good teacher never teaches only his subject.
27 It has never been more important that we should have such teachers; and this is because we now know that in another fifty years’ time the great bulk of our teaching will be done by machines. To those who can conceive of education only as the learning of facts and techniques that will be useful to the economic system, this prospect is excellent. No human teacher will be able to equal a well-programmed computer-teacher in his command of the science of his subject, or in his efficiency as an imparter of information.
28 I referred to this mechanistic heresy in the discussion of Christianity. But the best method is the most effective one for the situation, not the most efficient in theory. The menace facing us in the near future is that we shall be ourselves mechanized into believing that the good teacher is the most efficient in terms of the facts of his subject. If we believe this, then we shall fall under the tyranny of our computers – in short, under the worst, because universal, form of nationalism in the history of man.
29 But not all is black in this prospect. There are many fields in which we can welcome the computer-teacher; and that will free the human teachers for the teaching of the subjects (perhaps it would be better to say method of teaching) where they cannot be supplanted. And one of the prime purposes of the triple education in humanity I am advocating will be to counteract, or place in perspective, the triumph of the computer in its appropriate fields.
ART AND SCIENCE
30 This specific problem of the computer-teacher leads to the next great problem: that of the proper roles of science and art in human life.
31 Everyone should have a sound grounding in all the fundamental sciences, and all should know the great linchpin, the axis of reason, that is, scientific method. But large areas of science are remote from the ordinary business of living, and I would define the areas most relevant to education in humanity as those that destroy prejudice, superstition and the kind of ignorance that is clearly harmful to society. In March, 1963, hundreds of Balinese were killed in a volcanic eruption because they would not leave their homes. They believed that the gods would punish anyone who ran away. Our world spends millions on exploring planets we already know to be uninhabitable and yet lets such lethal stupidity still brew on Earth.
32 Science has two principal effects on its practitioners. One, totally beneficial, is heuristic – that is, it trains the scientist to think and discover for himself. Plainly we need as much education in this aspect of science as we can get. But another characteristic of science is double-edged, and this is its tendency to analyse, to break down the whole into components. Now plainly analysis is a very vital part of the heuristic process; but its side-effects, as in some medicines, may be extremely pernicious.
33 The purely analytic scientist becomes so accustomed to seeing matter as a demonstration of certain verifiable or falsifiable principles that he fives at one remove from it. Between him and the real world springs the law, the explanation, the necessity to categorize. Everything Midas touched turned to gold, everything this kind of scientist touches turns to its function m his analysis.
34 There is another allied danger. The complexity of the modern sciences is such that specialization is essential; not only in the interests of scientific or industrial efficiency, but in the nature of the mind’s capacity. The scholar in many fields is extinct; not because the desire to be such a scholar is extinct, but because the fields are too many, and too complex.
35 Pure science and impure economics both require of the scientist that he should live most of his thinking life along some spoke remote from the true hub of society of which he is a member; and from the true hub of the now in which he is. This produces the characteristic and expectable two-facedness of the modern
scientist: scientific morality and social immorality. Scientists have an inherent tendency to become slaves of the state.
36 The scientific mind, in being totally scientific, is being unscientific. We are in a phase of history where the scientific pole is dominant; but where there is pole, there is counterpole. The scientist atomizes, someone must synthesize; the scientist withdraws, someone must draw together. The scientist particularizes, someone must universalize. The scientist dehumanizes, someone must humanize. The scientist turns his back on the as yet, and perhaps eternally, unverifiable; and someone must face it.
37 Art, even the simplest, is the expression of truths too complex for science to express, or to conveniently express. This is not to say that science is in some way inferior to art, but that they have different purposes and different uses. Art is a human shorthand of knowledge, a crucible, an algebra, a tremendous condensing in the case of great art of galaxies of thoughts, facts, memories, emotions, events, experiences, to ten lines in Macbeth, to six bars in Bach, to a square foot of canvas in a Rembrandt.
38 Certain scientific laws may seem analogous to great art; they condense countless trillions of phenomena into one statement. But this statement is an abstraction, not a concentration, of reality.
39 All arts tend to become sciences, or crafts; but the essential mystery in art is that the artist constantly surpasses whatever the science or the craft of the art might have foretold; and constantly surpasses the scientific description and evaluation of what is art and what is good or bad art.
40 Art is always a complex beyond science. It computes all the computers. One might feed the tastes of a thousand musical people into a computer, which could then compose ‘their’ music; but it would deny the great principle – an artefact is pre-eminently whatever only one man could have made. It is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.*
