...education precisely consists in the realisation of a permanent simplicity that abides behind all civilisations, the life that is more than meat, the body that is more than raiment. The only object of education is to make us ignore mere schemes of education. Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

 In the field of philosophy humanism must be regarded, quite frankly, as a Philistine movement: even an obscurantist movement. In that sense the New Learning created the New Ignorance. Perhaps every new learning makes room for itself by creating a new ignorance. In our own age we have seen the sciences beat back the humanities as humanism once beat back metaphysics. Man’s power of attention seems to be limited; one nail drives out another. 

C.S Lewis

How strange it is, then, that we should so constantly think of education as having something to do with such things as reading and writing! Why, real education consists of having nothing to do with such things as reading and writing. It consists, at the least, of being independent of them. Real education precisely consists in the fact that we

see beyond the symbols and the mere machinery of the age in which we find ourselves: education precisely consists in the realisation of a permanent simplicity that abides behind all civilisations, the life that is more than meat, the body that is more than raiment. The only object of education is to make us ignore mere schemes of education. Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously. The latest fads of culture, the latest sophistries of anarchism will carry us away if we are uneducated: we shall not know how very old are all new ideas. We shall think that Christian Science is really the whole of Christianity and the whole of Science. We shall think that art colours are really the only colours in art. The uneducated man will always care too much for complications, novelties, the fashion, the latest thing. The uneducated man will always be an intellectual dandy. But the business of education is to tell us of all the varying complications, of all the bewildering beauty of the past. Education commands us to know, as Arnold said, all the best literatures, all the best arts, all the best national philosophies. Education commands us to know them all that we may do without them all.

GK Chesterton

-December 2, 1905, Illustrated London News

Yea, from the table of my memory

I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past

That youth and observation copied there,

And thy commandment all alone shall live

Within the book and volume of my brain,

Unmixed with baser matter.

                                             Hamlet Act I Scene V

Crimson flames tied through my ears

Rolling high and mighty traps

Pounced with fire on flaming roads

Using ideas as my maps

“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I

Proud 'neath heated brow

Ah, but I was so much older then

I’m younger than that now

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth

“Rip down all hate,” I screamed

Lies that life is black and white

Spoke from my skull, I dreamed

Romantic facts of musketeers

Foundationed deep, somehow

Ah, but I was so much older then

I’m younger than that now

Girls’ faces formed the forward path

From phony jealousy

To memorizing politics

Of ancient history

Flung down by corpse evangelists

Un-thought of, though, somehow

 

Ah, but I was so much older then

I’m younger than that now

A self-ordained professor’s tongue

Too serious to fool

Spouted out that liberty

Is just equality in school

“Equality,” I spoke the word

As if a wedding vow

Ah, but I was so much older then

I’m younger than that now

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand

At the mongrel dogs who teach

Fearing not that I’d become my enemy

In the instant that I preach

My existence led by confusion boats

Mutiny from stern to bow

Ah, but I was so much older then

I’m younger than that now

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