G. K. Chesterton's Educational Wisdom

One of the remarkable aspects of reading G. K. Chesterton is how often one finds that his pearls of wit and wisdom, written over a hundred years ago, are applicable to our world today. One could easily be convinced that his words were penned at the beginning of the last week, rather than at the beginning of the last century. This joyful aspect of reading our patron’s work struck me again recently when a supporter of Chesterton Academy of Detroit shared a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, which coincided with my completion of Chesterton’s book What’s Wrong with the World, first published in 1910.

In the WSJ article, the authors describe parents who are disappointed with the academic results from schools where programs of “one-to-one” ratios of digital devices to students have been implemented. “Over the last decade, American schools embraced technology, spending millions of dollars on devices and apps, believing its disruptive power would help many children learn faster, stay in school and be more prepared for a competitive economy. Now many parents and teachers are starting to wonder if all the disruption was a good idea.”

Ah, if only they had read Chesterton:

Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself.

In classical education, like that offered at Chesterton Academy, students learn the wisdom of the ages from the greatest minds of the ages: Homer, Plato, Euclid, Augustine, Dante, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Newton, Chesterton, and, of course, our Lord Jesus Christ. Students also learn using proven methods, such as Socratic discussion and imitation of those who are masters—both teachers and those great minds. As Chesterton says:

Many a school boasts of having the latest ideas in education when it has not even the first idea; for the first idea is that innocence, divine as it is, may learn something from experience.

The authors of the article quote Keith Krueger, CEO of Consortium for School Networking, an association for school tech officers that also includes tech companies: “Schools need to determine how to equip [students] to be smart digital citizens.” But Chesterton has wisdom that parents and educators should keep in mind:

Whatever is done swiftly and systematically will mostly be done by a successful class and almost always in their interest.

and

Now (to reiterate my title) this is what is wrong. This is the huge modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering the human conditions to fit the human soul.

Meanwhile, we are interested to find that parents who work in Silicon Valley keep their own children away from the devices and apps they develop for other people’s families. “A 2017 survey conducted by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation found among 907 Silicon Valley parents that despite high confidence in technology's benefits, many parents now have serious concerns about tech's impact on kids' psychological and social development,” Chesterton says:

It is obvious to any Christian man (that is, to any man with a free soul) that any coercion applied to a cabman’s daughter ought, if possible, to be applied to a Cabinet Minister’s daughter.

Developing young people into Christians with free souls is the true purpose of education. The fundamental problem of humanity is Original Sin: our disordered and disintegrated tendencies which enslave us to our passions. But a liberal arts education is liberal, or rather liberating, because it allows students to learn and love what is true, good, and beautiful—the poetry of Virgil, the music of Palestrina, the logic of Aristotle, the wonder of the natural world—all of which, when properly understood, is integrated and points to the Second Person of the Trinity, our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Word by which all the cosmos was created, the source of all truth, the incarnation of all goodness, and the pattern of all that is beautiful. Helping our students to hear and experience this Word is our goal at Chesterton Academy:

Out of all this throng of theories, it must somehow select a theory; out of all these thundering voices it must manage to hear a voice; out of all this awful and aching battle of blinding lights, without one shadow to give shape to them, it must manage somehow to trace and track a star.