Chesterton's Thoughts on Mistakes in Modern Education - Uncommon Sense - The Official Podcast of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Lyssna här

G.K. Chesterton gave an entire quarter of What's Wrong with the World to what he called the mistake about the child, and his verdict was blunt: the schoolmaster works not for the parent but against him. In this solo back-to-school episode, Joe Grabowski follows that argument through to the line Chesterton offers as the whole purpose of teaching—to pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life—and asks what it would take to recover the childlike wonder Chesterton insisted was education's only real aim.

What's in This Episode:

Why G.K. Chesterton opened What's Wrong with the World with a chapter about medicine, and what a doctor's knowledge of a healthy body has to do with schools
The chapter Chesterton titled The Outlawed Parent, where he charges that the schoolmaster works against the parent rather than for him
The single sentence Chesterton offers as the only real aim of education, and why it is easy to miss in a book this quotable
What Chesterton meant in In Defence of Baby Worship by a new universe inside every child's head, and why it does not make him an idealist
The passage in Orthodoxy where Chesterton imagines God saying "do it again" to the sun every morning

Resources Mentioned:

Chapters:

00:00: Introduction
00:30: Back to school, and what education is actually for
02:29: The medical mistake, and why we stopped asking what is right
04:47: Education, or the mistake about the child
07:42: Parents standing up at school board meetings
09:33: The Chesterton Schools Network
11:59: The only real aim of education
14:18: Keeping familiarity from breeding contempt
19:08: In Defence of Baby Worship, and a new universe in every head
21:31: The delight children take in inventing words
23:48: Man the sign maker, and Walker Percy on language
26:11: The eternal appetite of infancy