Education Quote by William Ralph Inge

Inge’s line carries the calm authority of a pulpit, but its real punch is a rebuke: stop mistaking information for formation. Coming from an Anglican clergyman who watched Britain lurch through industrial modernity, mass schooling, and the psychic aftershocks of two world wars, the sentence reads like a warning against a culture drunk on measurement. “Facts” are countable, examinable, credential-friendly. “Values” are harder: they imply judgment, conscience, and a hierarchy of goods that can’t be reduced to a syllabus.

The phrasing is surgical. He doesn’t say facts are useless; he demotes them. “Knowledge not of facts but of values” flips the expected pairing, insisting that the deeper kind of knowing is ethical and interpretive, not merely accumulative. It’s also a quiet indictment of technocracy before the term had its current bite. If education becomes a pipeline for data and competence, it can produce brilliant people who are morally untrained - the kind of cleverness that builds systems without asking who they serve.

Subtextually, Inge is defending an older humanistic and religious idea of education as character-making, not workforce-prepping. That stance isn’t neutral. Values are contested, and in Inge’s world they were often tethered to Christian moral order and social cohesion. The line works because it names a tension still alive: societies love the security of “facts,” but they live or collapse by the standards they teach people to apply when facts run out, conflict, or get weaponized.