“What are books but folly, and what is an education but an arrant hypocrisy, and what is art but a curse when they touch not the heart and impel it not to action?”

Source: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Ch. 29, Song, st. 1.

Source: Gaudy Night

" Where does the uttered Music go? http://www.williamwalton.net/works/choral/where_does_the_uttered_music_go.html" (1946)

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)
Context: It may come as a surprise to our technocrat philosophers, but people do not read, write, speak, or listen primarily for the purpose of achieving a test score. They use language in order to conduct their lives, and to control their lives, and to understand their lives. An improvement in one's language abilities is therefore... observed in changes in one's purposes, perceptions, and evaluations. Language education... may achieve what George Bernard Shaw asserted is the function of art. "Art," he said in Quintessence of Ibsenismn, "should refine our sense of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy, greatly heightening our self knowledge, self-control, precision of action and considerateness, and making us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice, and intellectual superficialty and vulgarity." …For my purposes, if you replace the word "art" with the phrase "language education," you will have a precise statement of what I have been trying to say.

Source: Short fiction, Dragonfield and Other Stories (1985), The Pot Child (p. 110)

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

"To Lucasta on Going to the War — For the Fourth Time"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

"New methods and new aims in teaching", in New Scientist, 22(392) (21 May 1964), pp.483-4.