"One Great Epic Unfolding": H.G. Wells and the Interwar Debate on the Teaching of History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AbstractThis essay explores H.G. Wells’s attempts to reform the teaching of history between the two World Wars. Holding history teachers largely responsible for creating the mood of bellicose nationalism that made the First World War possible, Wells concluded that only a fundamentally reformed history education would ensure the survival of the human species. He pressed for a global history, to be taught in all the world’s schools, that began with the origins of the universe and ended with the present and a glimpse into the future that transcended national borders, and would be taught appropriately. Wells was widely read and often quoted by teachers but was unable to change the priorities of educational policy-makers. This essay examines his objections to conventional history; explores his alternative model of history education; and explains his eventual failure. Wells made an important contribution to the debate about history teaching in the inter-war years and his educational ideas have been unduly neglected. Résumé Cet article expose les tentatives de l’écrivain H. G. Wells en vue de réformer l’enseignement de l’histoire entre les deux guerres mondiales. Il tenait les professeurs d’histoire responsables du climat de nationalisme belliqueux qui avait rendu possible la guerre de 1914-1918. Wells était arrivé à la conclusion que seule une réforme en profondeur de l’enseignement de l’histoire pouvait assurer la survivance de l’espèce humaine. Il préconisait une histoire universelle, enseignée dans toutes les écoles du monde, qui commencerait avec les origines de l’univers et qui se terminerait avec le présent et un aperçu du futur qui transcenderait les frontières nationales. Cette histoire se devait d’être enseignée adéquatement. Beaucoup lu et souvent cité par des enseignants, néanmoins Wells n’a pas réussi à influencer les orientations des programmes. Cet article examine sa critique de l’enseignement conventionnel de l’histoire, explore son modèle alternatif et explique son échec éventuel. La contribution importante de Wells au débat sur l’enseignement en histoire durant l’entre-deux-guerres et ses idées éducationnelles ont été par trop négligées.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".