Education, learning, epistemology

understand all of their subject except their subject. They were, I suppose, bred and born in that brier–patch, and have really explored it without coming to the end of it. That is, they have studied everything but the question of what they are studying.

But the important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of authority in education; it is not so much (as poor Conservatives say) that parental authority ought to be preserved, as that it cannot be destroyed.

A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.

The point is, that the poor in London are not left alone, but rather deafened and bewildered with raucous and despotic advice. They are not like sheep without a shepherd. They are more like one sheep whom twenty-seven shepherds are shouting at. All the newspapers, all the new advertisements, all the new medicines and new theologies, all the glare

On this ship I was a child again, knowing no more of the world around me than a child does.