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. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and-rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that education is inherently linked to beliefs or dogmas, and effective teaching requires a clear set of principles.
Gilbert K. Chesterton argues that education cannot exist without underlying beliefs or dogmas. He suggests that a teacher who lacks a strong stance is not effectively teaching, as education is about imparting knowledge based on a particular framework. Instead of broadening education in all directions, the focus should be on selecting and rejecting ideas that shape a cohesive understanding of culture and learning. Chesterton believes that those deemed 'uneducated' have simply been misled by ineffective educational practices, highlighting the importance of having a definite creed in teaching.
In practice
During a lecture on educational philosophy, to introduce the necessity of a guiding principle.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn
Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why.
I had a teacher when I was in college, and he was the first person who liked my photos and said, 'The way you look at girls is your own way of seeing.' He was the first person who really gave me the confidence to try something.
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Here’s how a child listens: you tell him something, and he puts his own interpretation on what you said. That’s what he hears. No one has ever heard you.
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