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
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
