Religion and Education
Chesterton, G. K.
553 RELIGION AND EDUCATION By G. K. CHESTERTON IT IS only by a definite and even deliberate narrowing of the mind that we can keep religion out of education. I do not deny that it may, in...
...Rightly or wrongly, its image of the universe is not that of a post put up with the design of having a lamp on it— it is rather that of a post that grew like a tree...
...It is not merely a question of secular education that seems indifferent to religion, but of scientific education that seems rather indifferent to ethics...
...to whom the world is a large objective obstacle...
...And I mean no offense when I say that anybody who has this sort of education is Literally a half-educated person...
...But no man has a right to answer it or even to arrange for it being answered, as if it were a sort of peculiar and pedantic additional question, which only a peculiar and pedantic sort of pupil would be likely to ask...
...An evolutionary education is something very different from an education about evolution...
...To some of us it seems strange that such very antiquated Protestantism should be supposed to represent religion...
...I do not deny that it may, in certain cases, be the least of many evils...
...a tramp may lean against a lamp-post...
...but they tell us not to trouble whether he has the right picture of the world...
...And this principle is important in the controversy about religious education, because it involves the whole question which was so prominent in the controversy, the question of what is called "atmosphere...
...The lamp of faith that did in fact illuminate the street for the mass of mankind in most ages of history, was not only a wandering fire seen floating in the air by visionaries—it was also for most people the explanation of the post...
...The stoic, like the tramp, may lean on it...
...But secular education is a limitation, if it be only a self-limitation...
...of a choice that is mysteriously offered and followed by equally mysterious consequences...
...The truth is that there is implied in almost all idealism a number of ideas which the idealists have seldom really followed out as ideas...
...I am not implying, of course, that there is no value in a secular social enthusiasm, or even that, in the language that some use sincerely and even usefully, it may not deserve to be called religion...
...The deepest of all desires for knowledge is the desire to know what the world is for and what we are for...
...of a sort of ultimate tryst with nobody in particular...
...It is sometimes said that the devotees of a doctrinal religion, who are so often depicted as donkeys, are in matters of this kind wearing blinkers...
...Now considering this vision of vague growth simply as an atmosphere and an impression on the minds of the young (apart from its truth or falsehood) there is no doubt that it tends, so far as it goes, to the notion of most things being much of a muchness, being all equally inevitable fruits of the same tree, and certainly not towards the idea of moral choice and conflict...
...The natural thing is to say what you think about nature...
...I am talking about educational effects, as...
...but certainly it is not in itself educational...
...He is not wearing blinkers, which implies deliberately limiting the field of his own vision...
...I am writing educationally and considering the probable psychological impression of certain atmospheres and fine shades...
...And if other people only say that everything is a growth of evolution, he will not admit that they have said what he wishes to say...
...It is more polite and equally pointed to call it monistic...
...It makes the matter too disputable and provocative, perhaps, to call that philosophy materialistic...
...So that even if we ignore the primary question of religion in the sense of the purpose of creation, there is the same sort of problem about religion even if we use it in the sense of the purpose of doing good...
...Now secular education really means that everybody shall make a point of looking down at the pavement, lest by some fatal chance somebody should look up at the lamp...
...In any other matters these people would be the first to tell us that education must take note of all the influences forming the mind, however apparently light or accidental...
...But even when we make the lamp-post quite objective, it is not unnatural to ask what is its object...
...The truth is that the idea of atmosphere is simply a piece of the elementary psychology of children...
...in short, all the rich tints of a London fog surrounding a lamp-post without a lamp...
...that it may be a sort of loyalty to a political compromise...
...It seems stranger that such very antiquated Darwinism should be supposed to represent science...
...and, anyhow, he is describing the whole of it...
...What I doubt is whether it can in this sense deserve to be called reason...
...but if it is very vivid to him we cannot blame him for describing it...
...So it is with those who merely bump into a headless world as into a lampless post...
...that it is certainly better than a political injustice...
...If you do not know, of course, you will not be able to say...
...Whether or no they can ever be known, they are not only worth knowing, but they are the simplest and most elementary sort of knowledge...
...but the mere fact of not being able to answer the question that the other person is most likely to ask, may or may not be what some people call education—but it is not a very brilliant exhibition of instruction...
...All that it means is that anybody who has a right to answer this question has a right to answer it as if it were the sort of question that it is —a question affecting the nature of the whole world and the purpose of every part of human life...
...It does not satisfy the primary intellectual hunger about the meaning of life that certain people may mean well even when they doubt whether it means anything...
...If a low cloud like a London fog must indeed cover that flame, then it is an objective fact that the object will remain chiefly as an object to be bumped into...
...There is the notion of a test without any notion of where it is tested...
...I say that a great deal of evolution in education would not make that education very insistent on the ideas of free-will and fighting morality, of dramatic choice and challenge...
...Just as a religious school openly and avowedly gives a religious atmosphere, so a scientific class does sometimes covertly or unconsciously give a materialistic atmosphere...
...I am not writing controversially or trying to pin anybody with this as an individual necessity...
...a lamp-post that eventually grew its own lamp...
...the optimist, like the drunkard, may embrace it...
...of a mystical value attached to one part of our nature without any authority to value it...
...His vision may be in our view an illusion...
...But there is another aspect of the case, which illustrates the real truth in the rather rustic puritanism of the people who recently made a fuss about Darwinism in Dayton...
...or how can there be a black and white choice between its slow gradations of green...
...a drunkard may embrace a lamp-post or, even in a lighter moment, try to climb a lamp-post...
...I am very far from lacking in respect for all this groping idealism...
...They will go wild with dismay if the child has to look at the wrong wall-paper...
...If a man believes that there is between vice and virtue a chasm like that of life and death, he will want to say so...
...The man who teaches authoritative answers to ultimate questions, even if he only says that Mumbo Jumbo made the world out of a pumpkin, may be dogmatizing or persecuting or tyrannically laying down the law about everything, but he is not blinking anything...
...and especially, so to speak, about the nature of nature...
...Even if the lamp-post appears as a post without a lamp, and therefore a post without a purpose, it may be possible to take different views of it...
...He also is a little annoyed at not being allowed to put the first things first...
...But as a matter of fact the protest and prosecution on that occasion did represent something...
...the only really intelligent doubt would be whether he ought to direct the minds of other and helpless people at all...
...they will set themselves seriously to see that he has the right picture of the wombat...
...It stood for a strong popular instinct, not without justification, that science is being made to mean more than science ever really says...
...A secularist teacher has just as much difficulty as a priest would have in not giving his own answer to the questions that are most worth answering...
...If you have convictions upon these cosmic and fundamental things, whether negative or positive, you are an instructor who is on one most important point refusing to instruct...
...I only say that by its own confession it is very incomplete compared with that of anybody who has a complete philosophy, because he has a creed...
...the progressive may attempt to climb it, and so on...
...Secular education is more sensible than making religion one of the extras, like learning fretwork or Portuguese...
...Your motive may be generous, or it may be merely timid...
...of a contrast between black and white, or a battle between light and darkness...
...The first and most obvious thing that a person is interested in is what sort of world he is living in, and'why he is living in it...
...It is a good thing that children should fully realize that there is an objective world outside them, as solid as the lamp-post out in the street...
...That is to say, he of all people objects most to sacred and profane things being united and to a religion that works on week-days as well as on Sundays...
...The expression "a religious hour" is something very like a contradiction in terms...
...Those who believe they can answer that question must at least be allowed to answer it as the first question and not as the last...
...A bicyclist may bump into a lamp-post...
...554 THE COMMONWEAL October 14, 1925 A man has a right to teach religion if he has a right to teach anything...
...I only say that there is a difference, and not a small or secondary difference, between those who know and those who do not know what the post is for...
...The word is not wisely chosen by the critic, and in one sense is much more applicable to the critic himself...
...He tends more and more to turn his science into a philosophy...
...And it is amusing to note that the same casual sceptic who is always sneering at the orthodox for their forms and limitations, who is always talking of their Sunday religion and their separation of things sacred and profane, is generally the very man who is most ready to make fun of the idea of a religious atmosphere in the schools...
...Nor are those things mere hole-and-corner objects of a special curiosity...
...If there is such a thing in the world as a donkey delibeiately wearing blinkers, it is the enlightened educationist, who is always making a nervous effort to keep out of his task of imparting knowledge any reference to the things that men from the beginning of the world have most wanted to know...
...Why should one fruit challenge another fruit on the same tree...
...I am not blaming anybody who can only manage to regard the world in that highly objective light...
...But the point is that this philosophy has in it something altogether alien, not only to all religions that refer back to the will of God, but even to all moralities that revolve upon the will of man...
...If he is to teach religion, it is absurd to ask him to teach it as if it were something else that did not apply to all the activities of man...
...A man who cannot answer it has a right to refuse to answer it, though perhaps he is rather too prone to comfort himself with the very dogmatic dogma that nobody else can answer it if he can't...
...But it is not a strange or specialist sort of knowledge to note about a lamp-post that it has a lamp...
...A naturalist, noting the common objects of the street, may observe many facts and put them down in a note-book...
Vol. 2 • October 1925 • No. 23
