e soldering; these sciences may
be healthy or no as hobbies; but they deal with stone and kettles, with
definite things. But education is not a word like geology or kettles.
Education is a word like "transmission" or "inheritance"; it is not an
object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views
or qualities, to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial
facts or the most preposterous views or the most offensive qualities;
but if they are handed on from one generation to another they are
education. Education is not a thing like theology, it is not an inferior
or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms.
Theology and education are to each other like a love-letter to the
General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong;
in practice probably more educational. It is giving something--perhaps
poison. Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can
be treason.

This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored
in our political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a
little house, son of a little tradesman, is taught to eat his breakfast,
to take his medicine, to love his country, to say his prayers, and to
wear his Sunday clothes. Obviously Fagin, if he found such a boy, would
teach him to drink gin, to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme
and to wear false whiskers. But so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would
abolish the boy's breakfast; Mrs. Eddy would throw away his medicine;
Count Tolstoi would rebuke him for loving his country; Mr. Blatchford
would stop his prayers, and Mr. Edward Carpenter would theoretically
denounce Sunday clothes, and perhaps all clothes. I do not defend any of
these advanced views, not even Fagin's. But I do ask what, between the
lot of them, has become of the abstract entity called education. It is
not (as commonly supposed) that the tradesman teaches education plus
Christianity; Mr. Salt, education plus vegetarianism; Fagin, education
plus crime. The truth is, that there is nothing in common at all between
these teachers, except that they teach. In short, the only thing they
share is the one thing they profess to dislike: the general idea of
authority. It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from
education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated
from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply
a teacher who is not teaching.