There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.
Interpretation
Chesterton suggests we can handle nonsense by either embracing it in its appropriate context or misplacing it in serious discussions.
In this quote, Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the dual ways in which people can approach nonsense in the world: either by accepting it in contexts where it is positive, like nursery rhymes, or by mistakenly applying it to serious matters such as education and psychology. This distinction underscores the importance of context in evaluating ideas and critiques, encouraging a more thoughtful examination of what is considered 'nonsense' versus what is valid.
In practice
During a lecture, one might reference this quote to discuss the role of humor in education.
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.
If children have interest, then Education happens
For children, diversity needs to be real and not merely relegated to learning the names of the usual suspects during Black History Month or enjoying south-of-the-border cuisine on Cinco de Mayo. It means talking to and spending time with kids not like them so that they may discover those kids are in fact just like them.
It takes a great deal of living to get a little deal of learning.
Your understanding of what you read and hear is, to a very large degree, determined by your vocabulary, so improve your vocabulary daily.
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
Talent is a by-product of education; the quality of a country's human capital depends on it.
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