Post: Tim Hall, Ph.D., Executive Director, Religion Matters
There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.
—H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
When I first read The Time Machine years ago, I was struck less by its vision of the future than by how that future arrives. H.G. Wells does not imagine a civilization destroyed by war or catastrophe. Humanity does not disappear with a boom. Instead, it drifts slowly into something diminished. Now, as an educator reading the novel, I am unsettled more by the story and its slow drift into inequality. But it is not simply the inequality Wells describes that unsettles me; it is the absence of inquiry that defines his future world. In Wells’s far future, people still live, work, and survive. What they no longer do is think and ask questions in disciplined ways. The habits that once allowed humans to investigate the past, test claims, deliberate on ethical meaning, and make meaning across generations and geography have quietly disappeared. Knowledge remains, but the disciplines and inquiry that once animated it no longer do. That reality is becoming increasingly familiar in educational conversations today.
A World Without Disciplinary Thinking
The Eloi, who live above ground, are not unintelligent in any traditional sense. They communicate, socialize, and enjoy comfort and beauty. Yet they live among the remnants of a civilization they do not know and cannot explain. They do not ask questions or interpret evidence, or weigh explanations. As the protagonist of The Time Machine, the Time Traveller observes, “I had great difficulty in conveying to them what I meant by the word ‘learning.’”
That line from the novella has lingered with me, particularly as conversations about education become increasingly focused on student outcomes, assessment benchmarks, and performance indicators. The Eloi are surrounded by the products of knowledge but are cut off from the processes that produced it. They inherit a world shaped by disciplines they no longer know how to practice. From the perspective of disciplinary literacy, Wells has not imagined a post-education society. He imagined a post-disciplinary society. It is a world in which learning has been reduced to knowledge without inquiry.
Testing, Standardization, and the Narrowing of Inquiry
One of the challenges of education reform today is that it often speaks of rigor while redefining what rigor means. High-stakes testing systems reward what can be measured: isolated facts, discrete skills, and short responses. Over time, this type of rigor standardizes and reshapes school curricula. History becomes facts rather than interpretation. Science becomes vocabulary rather than investigation. Literacy becomes strategies and skills rather than meaning-making. Disciplinary literacy asks something fundamentally different from teachers and students. It asks them to think like historians, scientists, and writers. They are asked to examine evidence, trace causes, contextualize ideas, learn nuance, and live with uncertainty. These practices are slow and resist standardization. And they do not lend themselves easily to scaling up.
Wells understood that intelligence is not compliance. “There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change,” he writes. In his view, intelligence comes from productive struggles and inquiry. When systems remove the need to question and when answers are pre-determined and success narrowly defined, learning becomes rote rather than generative. The Eloi from The Time Machine are capable of thinking. But they are over-protected from the intellectual need to think. An emphasis on security has sometimes replaced productive struggle, and with it, inquiry has faded away.
Standardization and the Flattening of Disciplines
Standardization can often be defended as a tool for equity, ensuring that all students receive access to the same education. In practice, however, it often flattens the different ways in which disciplines make meaning. Prescriptive pacing guides, scripted curricula, and standardized assessments prioritize coverage and efficiency over depth. The teacher covers the content rather than having students uncover it in the classroom. This matters because disciplines are not all alike. Historical thinking is not scientific reasoning. Ethical reflection is not the same as textual analysis. When all disciplines are reduced to the basics, students lose access to the intellectual practices that structure democratic life. Wells’s future reflects this leveling. The Eloi inherit knowledge without the disciplinary practices that sustain it. “I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been,” the Time Traveller laments. “It had committed suicide.” This suicide is not dramatic. It is slow and procedural. It occurs when educational systems reward performance over mastery and compliance over curiosity.
School Choice and the Fragmentation of Responsibility
The school choice movement introduces another dynamic today worth examining. Being framed as freedom of choice and innovation, it can often fragment the responsibility for supporting disciplinary learning as an essential element of democracy. When education is approached through a consumer-oriented lens, disciplines become features rather than foundational. For example, some schools emphasize test performance while others emphasize workforce readiness. And still others emphasize order, safety, or ideological alignment. What becomes harder to maintain is a shared commitment to disciplinary literacy as civic infrastructure needed for democracy. When families are asked to choose schools rather than societies choosing to sustain schools, access to disciplinary ways of knowledge becomes inconsistent. Historical memory fragments. Civic reasoning narrows. And conditions of inequality and inequity can deepen.
Wells’s future in The Time Machine offers a cautionary tale. The Eloi and Morlocks evolve separately because shared responsibility and understanding erode. And over time, inquiry itself becomes classed: available to some, irrelevant to others, and eventually unnecessary for everyone.
Disciplinary Literacy as Democratic Infrastructure
Disciplinary literacy is often framed as only curriculum and instruction. Wells reminds us that it is something more critical. It is how societies remember, argue, interpret, reflect, and rejuvenate themselves. History teaches us to see power in time. Science teaches us to test certainty. Ethics teachers teach us to reflect on responsibility. Religion, taught academically, teaches us to recognize difference. Wells’s future collapses because none of these practices lasts. The Eloi lack historical consciousness. The Morlocks lack ethical restraint. Neither possesses a shared framework that can be reformed. Public education has historically been the institution charged with maintaining these disciplinary practices. But when curriculum narrows, and classroom inquiry weakens, the consequences extend far beyond individual and collective achievements. A society and culture lose their capacity for judgment.
Where Religious Literacy Fits
From this perspective, religious literacy is not an add-on to disciplinary literacies; it is essential to understanding difference. Religion functions as a human discipline of interpretation, one through which individuals and communities make sense of suffering, justice, obligation, and hope. Because these interpretations shape how people understand themselves and others, failing to understand them leaves differences unexplained and open to easy misreading. H.G. Wells’s future is striking not simply for its inequality, but for its inability to interpret difference. The Eloi possess no shared narratives that connect them to the past or orient them to the future. The Morlocks act without moral reflection or shared ethics. In both cases, difference is no longer something to be understood. What has been lost is the interpretive ability to recognize the Other as a meaning-making being rather than an abstraction. When taught academically and inclusively, religious literacy helps students learn how to interpret differences rather than react to them. It equips them to analyze belief systems without generalizations and recognize how deeply held meanings shape human behavior across cultures and histories. Without that disciplinary understanding, difference collapses into stereotype, misunderstanding becomes suspicion, and plural democracy becomes fragile.
Teaching as Disciplinary Stewardship
In the closing pages of The Time Machine, the Time Traveller returns with no proof of his journey except for a fragile flower. His colleagues doubt his warning, and his evidence is dismissed. The future he describes feels impossible—until it is not. That ending resonates because educators often occupy a similar position. Teachers see the long arc of policy decisions and instructional shifts. They see what happens when inquiry fades, and disciplines flatten under the weight of standardization. Like the Time Traveller, teachers voice concerns that can sound abstract until their consequences become visible. To teach disciplinary literacy in a system shaped by testing, standardization, and choice is not merely a pedagogical preference. It is an intentional exercise of professional judgment. Teachers are not simply delivering content. They are preserving the ways of knowing that allow societies to renew themselves.
Changing the Timeline
The Time Machine is science fiction. But still, it reminds us that the future is shaped by what we choose to maintain. Every classroom that centers interpretation over recall, inquiry over coverage, and meaning over metrics shifts the timeline. Public education remains our most powerful form of time travel, not because it predicts the future, but because it teaches students how to think their way into the future. Wells shows us what is lost when that work ends. The question facing our education system is whether we will continue that work intentionally, even amid the competing pressures that shape education today. Educators across contexts are navigating this tension between institutional demands and the deeper purposes of teaching for a democracy.
Author Biography
Tim Hall, Ph.D., is a K–12 Social Studies Instructional Coordinator, adjunct history instructor, and founder of Religion Matters. His forthcoming book, Bringing Religious Literacy to the Classroom: Global Competence for K–12 Social Studies (Routledge, 2026), explores how teachers can foster empathy, inquiry, and inclusion in diverse classrooms.
AI Disclosure
Portions of this post were supported by generative writing tools for organization and language refinement. All ideas, interpretations, and final revisions reflect my own professional judgment, classroom experience, and commitment to thoughtful, inclusive, and inquiry-based education.
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