Arab children squatting round
the courtyard of a Mosque and swaying backwards and forwards as
they get by heart meaningless bits of the Koran, are not sent out
into life more inadequately armed with elementary educational
weapons than are English children. Our state of education has
nominally been systematised for forty-five years, and yet now in
our hospitals we have splendid young fellows in their early
twenties who can neither read nor write. I have talked with them.
I have read to them. I have written letters for them. Clean-cut,
decent, brave, honourable Englishmen--not gutter-bred Hooligans
dragged from the abyss by the recruiting sergeant, but men who
have thrown up good employment because something noble inside them
responded to the Great Call. And to the eternal disgrace of
governments in this disastrously politician-ridden land such men
have not been taught to read and write. It is of no use anyone
saying to me that it is not so. I know of my own certain intimate
knowledge that it is so.
Even among those who technically have "the Three R's," I have met
scores of men in our Wellingsford Hospital who, bedridden for
months, would give all they possess to be able to enjoy a novel--
say a volume of W.
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