On education

Part IV of 'What's wrong with the world' deals with education, or 'The mistake about the child'. The first sections are more or less preliminaries, dealing with what we would call the 'nature-nurture debate'. Chesterton, fifty years before the discovery of DNA, maintains that we do not know enough about heredity. The same, though, is true for the influences of the environment: we cannot predict how a child will be formed in a certain environment.
Having dealt with these preliminaries, Chesterton continues with what he calls the 'main fact about education', namely, 'that there is no such thing'. We need to realize that education is only a process of relaying information from an authority to a child. This means that we cannot separate 'dogma from education'.
Now we come at the crucial point: if 'education is only truth in a state of transmission', how can we 'pass on truth if it has never come into our hand?' First we need to know ourselves what children ought to know. We have a highly audacious duty: 'the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare tell it to a child.' From this duty, moderns are fleeing.