Chesterton’s Thoughts on Education

from What’s Wrong with the World

It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
~ G.K. Chesterton: Collected Works, Volume IV, p. 162

But the important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of authority in education; it is not so much (as poor Conservatives say) that parental authority ought to be preserved, as that it cannot be destroyed.
~ p. 166

That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.”
~ p. 167

Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea; for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it is, may learn something from experience.
~ p. 167

Today we all use Popular Education as meaning education of the people. I wish I could use it as meaning education by the people.
~ p. 167

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Christine

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