wrong with modern civilisation. But they suggested that what was
wrong with the present generation of adults could be set right for
the coming generation by means of education. In the last part of the
book, "Education or the Mistake about the Child," he put the
unanswerable question: How are we to give what we have not got? "To
hear people talk one would think [education] was some sort of magic
chemistry, by which, out of a laborious hotch-potch of hygienic
meals, baths, breathing-exercises, fresh-air and freehand drawing, we
can produce something splendid by accident; we can create what we
cannot conceive." The social reformers who were talking about
education seem not to have seen very clearly what they meant by the
word. They argued about whether it meant putting ideas into the child
or drawing ideas out of the child. In any case, as Chesterton pointed
out, you must choose which kind of ideas you are going to put in or
even which kind you are going to draw out. "There is indeed in each
living creature a collection of forces and functions; but education
means producing these in particular shapes and training them for
particular purposes, or it means nothing at all."

But to decide what they were trying to produce was altogether too
much for the men who were directing education in our Board Schools.
The Public Schools of England were often the target of Chesterton's
attacks; but they had, he declared, one immense superiority over the
Board Schools. The men who directed them knew exactly what they
wanted and were on the whole successful in producing it. Those
responsible for the Board Schools seemed to have no idea excepting
that of feebly imitating the Public Schools. One disadvantage of this
was that, at its worst and at its best, the Public School idea could
only be applicable to a small governing class. The other disadvantage
was that whereas in the Public Schools the masters were working with
the parents and trying to give the boys the same general shape as
their homes would give them, the Board Schools were doing nothing of
the kind. The schoolmaster of the poor never worked with the parents;
often he ignored them; sometimes he positively worked against them.
Such education was, Chesterton held, the very reverse of that which
would prevail in a true democracy. "We have had enough education for
the people; we want education by the people."

Chesterton felt keenly that while the faddists were perfectly
prepared t