A NEW DARK AGE

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 131, 6 June 1933, Page 7

A NEW DARK AGE

DUE TO EDUCATION

FAULT OF UNIVERSITIES

MR. SHAW'S THESIS

I have a very strong opinion that every university on the face of the earth ought to be levelled to the ground and its foundations sowed with salt, said Mr. Bernard Shaw in an address to students at Hong Kong recently. I am never tired of pointing out that only very recently civilisation was almost destroyed by a tremendous war. We do not as yet know whether civilisation has not been entirely destroyed by that war, but it does not matter, because one of the things that tho war proved was that there was very little civilisation at all. That war was made by people with university educations. There are really two dangerous classes in the world. There are the half-educated, who have destroyed one-half of civilisation, and there are the wholly educated, who have nearly completely destroyed the world. You ought very carefully to study the works of Professor Flinders Petrie. When I was young, which was an incalculable number of years ago, nobody knew anything about old civilisations. We knew a little about Greece and Rome. Rome somehow had collapsed into the Dark Ages, but until Professor Flinders Petrie began to dig up old civilisations we had no idea of how many civilisations exactly like our own had collapsed. They almost all collapsed through education. I think the reason of that was that in order to keep civilisation together you really require people of more or less original minds. Now the nniversity turns out people with .artificial minds. You come here and they turn out your mind and substitute an artificial mind. And accordingly I foresee the complete collapse of our civilisation, and we in turn will go back to what will be called the- Dark Ages. SOMETHING THERE. Of course, what you are going to do I don ft know. You may say, "Shall I leave the university?" or "Shall I go into the street?" We 11,.1 don't know. There is something to be got from the university. You get a training in communal life which is advantageous, and'l should recommend it to a son of mine, if I had a son. I should send*> him to a university and say to him: "Be very careful about letting them put an artificial mind in you. As regards the books they want you to read, don't read them." A school textbook is, by definition, an unreadable book. The fact (that I am an entirely uneducated man is due to the fact that I never could read schoblbooks of any kind. The time I was supposed to devote to reading schoolbooks I was reading real books — books written by people who could really -write,, which is never the case with the authors of textbooks. Be careful, as I say, to read the real books and just do enough of your textbooks to prevent your being ignominiously kicked out of the university. Read the good books,, the' real books, and steep yourselves in all the revolutionary books. If you don't begin to be a revolutionist at the age of 20, then at 50 you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you are a revolutionary at the age of 20, you have some chance of being up to date when you are 40! I can only say to all of you: Go ahead in the direction I have indicated. Always argue with your teacher. If possible, if you have a professor of history, who gives you his view on history, what you have got to say is, "Now, look here, we have heard your views, but what we are going to do is to find another professor of history who disagrees with you. (You will find that very easily.) Now let ns hear yon two argue it out." BOTH SIDES. Always learn things controversially. Yon "will find there- is a continual plot to teach you one side of a thing dogmatically. A great many young men come to the university who are entirely incapable of profiting, and yet you have to give them degrees; consequently you teach them something by which they can answer questions. If you taught, them that there are two sides to a question, they would be hopelessly confused. To pass an examination never ascertain the truth of any question that is asked. Go to your teacher and ask, "What is the answer I am expected to make to that question?" Now, I am glad of the opportunity I have had of instilling this poison into you, and I hope it will keep you amused but that you will forget it in a week. In my young days I was a critic. I used to criticise the pictures and the theatres, for a weekly paper. When I went into a picture gallery—say, into an exhibition at the Royal Academy— I realised that I could only write one article about it. . At most I could only write two, and there were about two to three thousand pictures. What I had to do was to go rapidly through them and to select the twelve or fifteen pictures which ,were above the "unmentionable" line. That is what you have to do. When your professors and tutors put some facts before you. all occasionally, you have got to say, "Nothing doing that is not worth remembering." Like a ragpicker going over the dust heaps of history, you have to evaluate what you find, keep the sound things and forget the rest as completely as possible. Then you will go about like an educated man; you will go about with a few things worth remembering. The man who keeps everything not worth remembering often attains the highest university degree. The only thing you can do with such a man is to bury him.