redundant. A conservative 1967 estimate of the current redundancy in highly industrialized countries was
59 It is only in unmechanized peasant economies such as those in India that large families can be argued to be a necessity; and even if the argument is granted, clearly they are a necessity only for as long as the world allows such economies to be unmechanized.
60 The opposers on individualist grounds say this: choice of size of family is one of the last free choices left to adults in civilized society. To oblige them to limit the size of their families would be the surrender of the final citadel of the individual. I find such arguments the most attractive; and yet they collapse before the pressure of reality. For this kind of decision, to have or not have a certain number of children, is far more than a merely personal one. If this man and his wife decide to have a family of six, then they are making decisions that affect their society and their world far beyond the furthest scope of their own rights as individuals, and indeed far beyond their own existences.
61 As American sociologists have discovered, an ominous by-product of economic prosperity is that it turns the extra child into a desirable and affordable adjunct of the affluent life. From there it becomes a symbol of affluence, of success in life. The large family has always been encouraged by politicians and priests; the idolatry of those great gods Virility and Fecundity is easily induced. But surely the extra child is, in a world of starving children, the one luxury the already fortunate affluent have no right to offer themselves. For if we claim we are free to breed like rabbits, then evolution will see that we die like them.
62 There remains the second category of opposers: those who claim that it is evolutionally wrong to control population. There is a generational selfishness: let our children look out for themselves. There is a better argument. It is this: our capacity to multiply ourselves goes, and is meant to go, hand in hand with our capacity to feed ourselves. But according to this breed-and-brave-it theory if we are all to remain healthy we must remain in a state of acute crisis. We should build all our boats with a hole in the bottom-then pump.
63 Even if we could feed a population twice the size of the present world population, and feed them better than they are fed now, there is no likelihood that such an overpopulated world would be happier than a properly populated one.
64 The future will surely see our apathy over population control as the greatest folly of our time. They will see that a vast structure in our societies was totally unnecessary, a mere product of having too many mouths to feed, too many hands to keep occupied. But above all they will see that the state of overpopulation turns progress into regress. How many modern inventions, how many economic theories, are really not progressive, but simply desperate attempts to stop up the leaks in the sinking boat? How much ingenuity and energy is poured into keeping us afloat instead of moving forwards?
CONCLUSION
65 Money-obsessed societies produce dissatisfied men and women because power to buy is as habit- forming, and finally as pernicious, as heroin. One is dead before one has enough. They produce guilty men, because too few have too much, and too many are savagely punished for their innocent poverty and ignorance. Behind each shilling, each franc, each mark, rouble, dollar is the stick-limbed child, the future, the envious and famished world to come.
66 Scientifically we know more of one another, and yet, like the receding galaxies, we seem to become each lonelier, remoter. So most of us concentrate, in an apparently meaningless and only too evidently precarious universe, on extracting as much pleasure for ourselves as we can. We act as if we were born into the death cell; condemned to a dangerous age, to an inevitable holocaust; to a being whose only significant aspects are that it is ludicrously brief and ends in a total extinction of the power to enjoy. What hollows us operates, like an awl, in two directions simultaneously. We have not only an exasperating inability to get all that we want but also the excoriating counter-cutting fear that what we want to get is, in terms of a dimly glimpsed but far richer human reality, worthless. Never were there so many hollow people in the world, like a huge and mounting shore of empty cockleshells.
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.
