Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Huxley

Huxley isn’t asking for better lesson plans; he’s picking a fight with the intellectual furniture of Victorian Britain. When he says history should be taught “as a process of evolution,” he’s smuggling Darwin’s most destabilizing idea out of biology and into the civic imagination. The intent is strategic: if young people can be trained to see change as gradual, contingent, and law-governed, they’re less likely to accept tidy national myths, providential storytelling, or the comforting illusion that institutions are permanent because they’re “natural.”

The phrase “might be, and ought to be” matters. “Might” signals feasibility, a practical reformer’s tone; “ought” announces a moral imperative. Huxley isn’t neutral about education. He’s arguing that the next generation deserves tools to read the world without superstition, whether religious or patriotic. In his era, “history” often meant a parade of great men and decisive battles, a curriculum designed to produce loyal subjects. Huxley’s subtext is that this is propaganda-by-selection: it teaches reverence, not understanding.

He also understands the seduction of evolution as a narrative technology. Evolution makes complexity legible: it turns chaos into sequence, invites causal thinking, and gives “meaning” without needing a divine author. That word “meaning” is the pressure point. Huxley is offering a secular substitute for teleology: not destiny, but development; not moral fable, but process. It’s a wager that scientific literacy can be civic literacy - that teaching kids to think in timescales and mechanisms might produce citizens harder to fool.