“Our educational authorities have already made sure that the system is rigid without making sure that it is right. They have already achieved universality but not unity. They have arranged to teach history without considering what history teaches; they have obtained powers of compulsion for teaching the truth to everybody; and then, looking into their own minds, have found that the truth is not in them.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 12, 1920 as a header quotation on Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“There is no easy method of learning difficult things. The method is to close the door, give out that you are not at home, and work.”

Joseph de Maistre, originally encountered long ago in what seemed to be a web page printout from Frank magazine but supported by https://quotefancy.com/quote/1308968/Joseph-de-Maistre-There-is-no-easy-method-of-learning-difficult-things-The-method-is-to.

“The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.”

Elbert Hubbard according to www.quotationspage.com as of Dec. 10, 2005.

“I could hardly avoid a sort of suspicion that some of those [Professors] whom I was taken to see had been so long engrossed in their own study of hypothetics that they had become the exact antithesis of the Athenians in the days of St. Paul; for whereas the Athenians spent their lives in nothing save to see and to hear some new thing, there were some here who seemed to devote themselves to the avoidance of every opinion with which they were not perfectly familiar, and regarded their own brains as a sort of sanctuary, to which if an opinion had once resorted, none other was to attack it.”

Samuel Butler Erewhon

“A decolonized university is no university at all.”

Michelle Stirling  “Dr. Frances Widdowson's Arbitration Review – Phoenix from the Ashes” on her Climate of Hope Substack February 7, 2026 [https://michellestirlingg.substack.com/p/dr-frances-widdowsons-arbitration].

“IN THE ENORMOUS BATTLE FOR THE HEARTS AND MINDS AND SOULS OF OUR CHILDREN, the modern education system has all the advantages of size, reach, funding, compulsion, and control. That system includes both public and private schools that operate alike and madly follow the latest fads and fashions and fallacies and offer less and less of the timeless truths. We can look around and see the devastating results everywhere: a populace with little literacy, no reasoning skills, no moral compass, no knowledge of the past, no appreciation for our cultural accomplishments, no common sense. They are glued to screens, awed by vapid celebrities, and stuck in dead-end jobs as wage slaves. They are wobbly and depressed, but also angry and inarticulate. They think in fragments, they talk in fragments. They are the product of our nation’s education system. But the thing about Goliath is that he is made to be toppled. The thing about David, who will defeat him, is that he sings songs unto the Lord.”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023) [including start].

“Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Charlie Reese “Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, and more importantly, a two-time wearer of the Clerihew Championship Sash” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024) [he does not further source it].

“Returning to the problem he identified in The Abolition of Man and De Descriptione Temporum, in the great change from one culture to another, Lewis [in The Discarded Image] suggested that something has been lost. Even as Plato and Aristotle once governed the direction of science, new philosophes of science govern the direction and application of science until ‘now, in some extreme forms of Behaviorism, the subject himself is discounted as merely subjective; we only think that we think. Having eaten up everything else, he eats himself up too. And where we “go from that” is a dark question.’”

Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis