Chesterton is always good

Discover the Wit & Wisdom of Gilbert Keith Chesterton : On Business Education
https://gkcdaily.blogspot.fr/2018/04/on-business-education.html

But here is the kind of good with which he gains new readers who don't know he's good:

I am glad to see that what I applied to the unpractical reformer has been applied, by an unimpeachably practical man, to the unpractical instructor. Mr. John C. Parker, a hundred-per-cent American, a highly successful engineer, the vigorous agent of a company named after Edison — in short, a man with all the unquestioned stigmata of a Regular Guy, rigorous and energetic in the application of science to business, has recently astonished his friends by delivering an address with the truly admirable title, ‘Wanted — An Unpractical Education’. I have only read his remarks in an indirect form, but they seem to me quite excellent remarks. ‘My complaint would be rather that training youth to earn a living is not education at all; second, that a specific training may keep the youngster from earning the best kind of living; and third, that it can’t be done in school anyhow.’ Or, again, ‘I would infinitely prefer that education fit him for happiness and decency in poverty, than for wealth acquired through the sacrifice of himself and his character.’ These are almost startlingly sensible counsels; though what they would look like side by side with those shiny and strenuous advertisements inscribed ‘You Can Add Ten Thousand Dollars to Your Salary’, or ‘This Man Trebled his Turnover in Two Weeks’, it is not my province to conjecture.

Now, there might be some who would wonder if I wouldn't quibble about the sentence here:

training youth to earn a living is not education at all

Both I and even Chesterton have praised the old education system, in which Mozart and Haydn were trained to earn their living as musicians and Haydn's father as a cartwright - repairing or even building the chariots which were drawn by horsepowers that needed hay, not gazoline.

But, this old education was not JUST educating someone to play and compose or to build and repair chariots. It included catechism. And lots of fun. Even in businesses like cratwrighting, since lesser competivity helped to give some leisure for masters talking to apprentices and journeymen./HGL