PATRIOTISM IN EDUCATION

Every man has a number of purposes and desires, some purely personal, others of a sort which
he can share with many other men.

I shall assume the following three propositions conceded…

Education in the past has been a haphazard and traditional affair, supposed not to begin until
the child was at least six years old, and to be concerned almost exclusively with the acquisition
of knowledge.

An Agnostic thinks it impossible to know the truth in matters such as God and the future life
with which Christianity and other religions are concerned. Or, if not impossible, at least
impossible at the present time.

The thing that above all others I have been concerned to say is that because of fears that once
had a rational basis mankind has failed to profit by the new techniques that, if wisely used,
could make him happy.

Of all the studies by which men acquire citizenship of the intellectual commonwealth, no single one is so indispensable as the study of the past.

Mankind is in mortal peril, and fear now, as in the past, is inclining men to seek refuge in God.

Everybody knows Wells’s Time Machine, which enabled its possessor to travel backwards or forwards in time, and see for himself what the past was like and what the future will be.

The decay of traditional religious beliefs, bitterly bewailed by upholders of the Churches,
welcomed with joy by those who regard the old creeds as mere superstition, is an undeniable
fact. Yet when the dogmas have been rejected, the question of the place of religion in life is by
no means decided.

Teaching, more even than most other professions, has been transformed during the last hundred years from a small, highly skilled profession concerned with a minority of the population, to a large and important branch of the public service.