Journey To The Center Of

Sat, 8 October 2005

As I was preparing for our last JTTCO podcast - Journey To The Center Of Education - I searched out some good quotes from C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. Not wanting them to go to waste - since I didn't have a chance to read many in the podcast, and because I partially promised them in the cast - here they are:

G.K. Chesterton:
"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."

"We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom. Education is only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we pass on truth if it has never come into our hand?"

Speaking about the idea that education is "leading out", that educators draw out the innate knowledge in children (he also makes fun of this by saying they are leading out the child's innate love of long division and such) -
"I think it would be about as sane to say that the baby's milk comes from the baby as to say that the baby's educational merits do. There is, indeed, in each living creature a collection of forces and functions; but education means producing these in particular shapes and training them to particular purposes, or it means nothing at all. Speaking is the most practical instance of the whole situation. You may indeed "draw out" squeals and grunts from the child by simply poking him and pulling him about, a pleasant but cruel pastime to which many psychologists are addicted. But you will wait and watch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language out of him. That you have got to put into him; and there is an end of the matter."

"What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves. "

"The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense. "

C.S. Lewis:
"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil."

"You see at once that education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves... If education is beaten by training, civilization dies. That is a thing very likely to happen."

"One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world."

"The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it out while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come."

The demon Screwtape, advising other demons -
"The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.'... Children, who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma...by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I'm as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows?"

For these last few quotes, I'm greatly indebted to The Quotable C.S. Lewis. It's a great reference work and filled with Lewis' wisdom.

Category: general -- posted at: 1:28 AM

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