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Chesterton's Philosophy of Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John Haldane
John Haldane
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews
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Extract

‘Every education teaches a philosophy; if not by dogma then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. Every part of that education has a connection with every other part. If it does not all combine to convey some general view of life it is not education at all’ (Chesterton).

In an essay written for the thirtieth volume of the British Journal of Educational Studies, R. F. Dearden surveyed philosophy of education during the period 1952–82. As might be imagined he was largely concerned with the emergence in and development through these years of analytical philosophy of education, as the influence of linguistic or conceptual analysis spread beyond the somewhat ill-defined boundaries of core philosophy and was taken up by those interested in the theoretical presuppositions of educational practice. After charting the course of this development, and having reached the point at which certain worries arose about the limits of conceptual analysis as a method, Dearden turned to consider what if any alternatives might be available. The first possibility which he mentions in expectation of its having received explicit articulation is Catholic philosophy of education. However, as he notes, nothing meeting this description was developed during the period in question—in effect, since the war. The one book which he mentions, viz. Jacques Maritain's Education at the Crossroads, is barely known of in professional philosophy of education and in style and content is quite out of the mainstream.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 65 , Issue 251 , January 1990 , pp. 65 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1990

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References

1 ‘A New Case for Catholic Schools’, in The Common Man (London: Sheed & Ward, 1950), 167.Google Scholar

2 ‘Philosophy of Education, 1952–1982’, British Journal of Educational Studies XXX, No. 1 (1982).

3 Education at the Crossroads (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963)Google Scholar. See also Maritain, J., ‘Thomist Views on Education’, in Henry, Nelson B. (ed.), Modern Philosophies of Education (Chicago University Press, 1955).Google Scholar

4 Op. cit., 63–64.

5 For a discussion of the extent to which Chesterton's fictional writing was a vehicle for his social philosophy see Boyd, Ian, ‘Philosophy in Fiction’, in Sullivan, J. (ed.), G. K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal (London: Elek, 1974), 40–57Google Scholar. Something of the philosophical background to Chesterton's view of literature is explored in Hunter, Lynette, G. K. Chesterton: Explorations in Allegory (New York: St Martin's Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, see especially Ch. 10.

6 See Ethics, Value and Reality: Selected Papers of Aurel Kolnai, Dunlop, F. and Klug, B. (eds) (London: Athlone Press, 1977), xiii.Google Scholar

7 Subjekt-Objekt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962).Google Scholar

8 St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1933).Google Scholar

9 See Clemens, Cyril, Chesterton as Seen by his Contemporaries (London, 1939), 150–151Google Scholar. Gilson's admiration for Chesterton's study of Aquinas seems not to have waned. At the time of its appearance he is quoted as having said: ‘Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St Thomas all my life and I could never have written such a book.’ See Ward, Maisie, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), 524Google Scholar. (Anyone suspicious that this might be an ambiguous tribute should read the remainder of Gilson's apprecia tion quoted above.) Some thirty years after making this remark he wrote in a letter to the Revd MrScanell, , dated 7 01 1966Google Scholar, ‘[in that book Chesterton was] nearer the real Thomas than I am after reading the Angelic Doctor for sixty years’—as quoted in Hunter, Lynette, G. K. Chesterton, 173.Google Scholar

10 See Education and Inquiry, Phillips, D. Z. (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 72, 73.Google Scholar

11 Orthodoxy (London: Collins, 1961).Google Scholar

12 The Everlasting Man (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925).Google Scholar

13 Op. cit.

14 See, The Common Man, op. cit., 173–180.Google Scholar

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16 ‘On Twilight Sleep’, in Come to Think of It (London: Methuen, 1930), 161.Google Scholar

17 See ‘The End of the Moderns’, in The Common Man, op. cit., 196–205Google Scholar. In connection with evolutionary theory Chesterton offers the interesting observation that in addition to undermining the distinction between reasons and causes, it puts at risk the very possibility of knowledge by abandoning the idea of stable and enduring essences. In this thought he parallels Plato's reflection upon the sceptical implications of Heraclitean cosmology. Chesterton observes that ‘[evolution] means that there is no such thing as an age to change, and no such thing as a man to change him into. It means there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack … upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about’ (Orthodoxy, op. cit., 34–35).Google Scholar

18 Orthodoxy, op. cit., 17.Google Scholar

19 Op. cit., 22.

20 Op. cit., 27, 28.

21 Daily News, 21 12 1906.Google Scholar

22 St. Thomas Aquinas, op. cit., 144.1Google Scholar n her biography Maisie Ward writes of Chesterton's use of paradox that: ‘nearly all his paradoxes were either the startling expression of an entirely neglected truth, or the startling re-emphasis of the neglected side of a truth’ (Chesterton, op. cit., 155).Google Scholar

23 What's Wrong with the World (London: Cassell, 1910).Google Scholar

24 Op. cit., 191.

25 Op. cit., 200.

26 Op. cit., 201.

27 For more detailed discussions of these aspects of Aquinas' philosophy which also relate them to persistent problems in epistemology and metaphysics see Haldane, J., ‘Brentano's Problem’, Grazer Philosophische Studien Vol. 35 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Haldane, J., ‘Mind-World Identity and the anti-Realist Challenge’, in Reality and Reason, Haldane, J. and Wright, C. (eds) (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

28 See On Being and Essence (De Ente et Essentia) translated by Maurer, A. (Toronto: PIMS, 1968), Ch. II, sec. 4, 36–37.Google Scholar

29 See Sellars, W., Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), essay 5.Google Scholar

30 See Geach, P., Mental Acts (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), sec. 6 and Appendix.Google Scholar

31 In addition to the works by Sellars and Geach mentioned above see Hamlyn, D., Experience and the Growth of Understanding (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), Ch. 6.Google Scholar

32 See, for example, his Commentary on de Anima, 417a22–b17Google Scholar, which appears as Eleven, Lectio in Aristotle's De Anima in the Version of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), 240–241Google Scholar. For some discussion of the Thomist view of concepts as intellectual dispositions see Lonergan, Bernard, Verbum (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 1968)Google Scholar, Ch. V, and Haldane, J., ‘Brentano's Problem’, op. cit.Google Scholar

33 Super Epistolas Pauli Apostoli; also Summa Theologiae, Ia, q89.Google Scholar

34 De Ventate, I, ad 6.Google Scholar

35 Op. cit., I, q 11, aa 1 and 2; also Summa Theologiae, Ia, q117Google Scholar (the translation of the passage from De Veritate is from Gilby, Thomas, St. Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical Texts (Oxford University Press, 1951).Google Scholar

36 St. Thomas Aquinas, op. cit., 172–173.Google Scholar

37 For further discussion of Aquinas in connection with the idea of a normative anthropology adequate to ground judgments of value and requirement, see Haldane, J., ‘Metaphysics in the Philosophy of Education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education 23, No. 2 (1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Earlier versions of this essay were read to the Scottish Branch of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain at a conference held in the University of Edinburgh in November 1988 and to a meeting of the same society held in Cambridge in May 1989.