Passages about education

I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.

Glaucon imagines a ring that makes its wearer invisible and asks whether any man, just or unjust, would keep his hands off what he wanted.

The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Among the new objects that drew my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of conditions.

A power rises above the citizens, absolute, detailed, regular, provident and mild. It would be like a father's authority if, like that, its object were to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks instead to keep them permanently in childhood.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

For it is not histories that I am writing, but lives.

A small thing, a phrase or a joke, often shows character better than battles with thousands of dead and the greatest sieges.

What do I know?

There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge.

Man is by nature a political animal.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

A man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows, since he knows it, and in that case is in no need of searching; nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.

For seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

I walk on air and contemplate the sun.

Zeus? What Zeus? There is no Zeus.

A point is that which has no part.

Let the following be postulated: to draw a straight line from any point to any point.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

Brekekekex koax koax.

The poet should be admired for skill and for good counsel, and because we make people better in their cities.

All instruction is either about things or about signs; but things are learnt by means of signs.

Whoever thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbour, does not yet understand them as he ought.

I know you all, and will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness.

What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday.

All the sciences are nothing other than human wisdom, which always remains one and the same, however different the subjects to which it is applied.

By a method I mean reliable rules which are easy to apply, such that whoever follows them exactly will never take what is false to be true, and will arrive at a true understanding of everything within his capacity.

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: how comes it to be furnished? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.

It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

It was badly done, indeed!

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD. And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

Man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.

Is it not a pleasure to learn and to repeat or practise from time to time what has been learnt? Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

If you associate with me, on the very day you will go home a better man, and the same the next day, and every day you will get better and better.

Zeus, fearing that our race would be wholly destroyed, sent Hermes to bring justice and shame to men, and ordered that all should have a share, for cities cannot exist if only a few share in them as in the other arts.

My art of midwifery is in general like theirs; the only difference is that my patients are men, not women, and my concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth.

Man is the measure of all things, of the things which are that they are, and of the things which are not that they are not.

All that has by nature with systematic method been arranged in the universe seems both in part and as a whole to have been determined and ordered in accordance with number, by the forethought and the mind of him that created all things.

Perfect numbers are equal to the sum of their own parts: six, twenty-eight, four hundred and ninety-six, eight thousand one hundred and twenty-eight.

Speech was instituted in order that we might either teach or be reminded. What then do we do when we speak, except teach or be taught?

If I am given a sign and I do not know the thing of which it is a sign, it teaches me nothing; if I know the thing, what does the sign teach me?

All their life was spent not by laws, statutes or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. Their rule was this one clause: Do what you will.

I would rather have you learn nothing than learn such books under such masters, for their learning is but stupidity and their wisdom a sham, bastardising good and noble minds and spoiling the flower of youth.

I have taken all knowledge to be my province.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

She was so innocent that when I asked her what was troubling her, she answered that the kitten had died.

Marriage, Agnes, is no laughing matter. The duties of a wife are strict, and the position I am raising you to is not one of pleasure and liberty.

A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.

I imagine the minds of children as easily turned this or that way as water itself.

The most pressing interest of the ruler, as also his most indispensable duty, is therefore to watch over the observation of the laws of which he is the minister and on which his whole authority is founded.

You need me, for I am rich and you are poor. Let us therefore make an agreement: I will permit you to have the honour of serving me, on condition that you give me what little you have left for the trouble I shall take in commanding you.

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

If you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.

You must not take it as a discourtesy if I speak plainly. I claim the privilege of speaking to juveniles as a juvenile myself.

Consider the herd that is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today is, it leaps about, eats, rests, digests, leaps about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day.

There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense which injures and finally destroys the living thing, be it a man or a people or a culture.

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment. The important applications of the science, the theoretical interest of its ideas, and the logical rigour of its methods, all generate the expectation of a speedy introduction to processes of interest.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

He was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man's hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking.

It was of the men, not white nor black nor red, but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive.

An unnamed Athenian stranger walks with a Cretan and a Spartan to the cave of Zeus and drafts a legal code for a new colony called Magnesia, drawing comparatively on multiple actual historical legal traditions rather than constructing purely from abstract principle.

Over twelve books the speakers discuss the purpose of law, education, drinking parties, music, marriage, property, crime and punishment, and religion, with the preludes to each law meant to persuade citizens before compelling them rather than relying on bare command alone.

The Moralia collects Plutarch's seventy-eight surviving essays, dialogues and lectures on everything other than biography, including practical advice on listening to lectures, controlling anger, distinguishing a flatterer from a friend and consoling the bereaved.

The collection includes a defence of eating no meat, staking out an unusually early and considered position on animal ethics that extends moral consideration to non-human creatures in ways anticipating considerably later philosophical developments on this question.

Porphyry explains the five predicables, genus, species, difference, property and accident, and how each is defined and related to the others, giving logical students an essential and enduring vocabulary for classifying concepts with technical precision.

Porphyry raises but declines to answer whether genera and species exist in reality or only in the mind, identifying with unusual clarity the question that became the medieval problem of universals, one of Western philosophy's most persistently contested metaphysical debates.

There are three kinds of music, and the first is cosmic, the second human, and the third is that which is created by certain instruments, such as the cithara or the flute, or by other instruments that serve melody.

That man is a musician who has taken up the science of making judgments about song, mode and rhythm by weighing them with reason, not through the servitude of work but through the sovereignty of contemplation.

I came to know that what most distinguishes the Sufis is something that can be attained only by immediate experience, by ecstasy and by a moral change.

The disease was baffling, and it lasted almost two months, during which I was a determinist in fact, though not in theory or belief. Then God cured me of this malady. My spirit regained its health and equilibrium.

One person is said to teach another in that, by means of signs, he manifests to that other the process of reasoning which he himself goes through by his own natural reason.

A teacher does not cause knowledge in the learner directly, as fire causes heat, but rather stimulates and helps the learner's own reason to discover, by itself, what the teacher already knows.

Ibn Khaldun opens by exposing the errors and uncritical credulity of earlier historians, arguing that mere chronicle of events without attention to underlying causes produces unreliable history, and proposing instead a genuine science investigating the actual causes of social and political change.

He defines asabiyya as the group solidarity that binds kin together under hard conditions, arguing that nomadic peoples possess this solidarity in abundance, using it to conquer settled, city-dwelling populations whose own comfortable circumstances have eroded their capacity for similar cohesion.

I began to examine myself and my behavior as a natural woman, and similarly I considered other women whose company I frequently kept, and I could not see or realize, after taking real note of it, that the testimony of so many notable men could be false.

Reason tells her that the surest way to refute those who attack women is to prove, by manifest deduction and demonstrable examples, both past and present, that a great number of women have always devoted themselves to learning and the arts.

Luther identifies three walls the papacy hides behind, that clergy outrank laity, that only the pope may interpret scripture, and that only the pope may call a council, and argues against the first that every baptised Christian is a priest, undermining the foundation for all three.

Luther lists specific grievances against Rome, from papal taxation draining German wealth and the traffic in benefices treating church offices as purchasable commodities to clerical celibacy's actual practical consequences and the state of the German universities, proposing concrete remedies for each.

Young men boarding in Luther's house at Wittenberg took notes from 1531 onward on what he said over supper, and these scattered notes were gathered and printed only after his death, producing thousands of short entries in a mixture of German and Latin.

The entries range across scripture and predestination, the papacy and the Turks, music and marriage, moving without warning between weighty theological subjects and considerably more mundane topics within the same conversational setting.

Harrison surveys English society rank by rank, from gentlemen and nobility down through yeomen, artificers and day labourers, describing precisely what distinguished each rank's manner of living, dress and social standing within the broader Elizabethan social order.

He describes the recent spread of chimneys and glass windows in English houses as a genuine change within living memory, noting how older residents recalled smoky halls without chimneys and houses without glazed windows, a material transformation Harrison treats as significant social evidence.

Sidney argues that poetry is the oldest of learning and the best teacher of virtue, because it joins the philosopher's precept to the historian's example in a golden world of its own making, combining abstraction's generality with narrative's concrete particularity.

Sidney answers the charges that poets lie and corrupt, treating poetry's fictional status not as a liability requiring apology but as the very source of its distinctive pedagogical power, addressing moral objections to literature with unusual philosophical seriousness.

Milton defines the end of all learning as repairing the ruins of our first parents by regaining a right knowledge of God, grounding his entire proposed educational program in a specifically theological account of what learning is ultimately for.

Milton proposes a curriculum moving from languages through agriculture, mathematics, natural philosophy, ethics, politics and theology, and finally to poetry and rhetoric, with music, fencing and military exercise in the afternoons for a complete formation of the student.

Monsieur Jourdain, a rich cloth merchant's son, spends his money on masters of music, dancing, fencing and philosophy in the hope of passing as a nobleman, and discovers with delight that he has been speaking prose all his life.

Jourdain refuses to let his daughter marry a commoner despite being a commoner himself by birth, so her suitor disguises himself as the son of the Grand Turk and confers a bogus title on Jourdain in an elaborate mock ceremony.

The satirical poem Hombres necios turns on men who blame women for the faults men cause, staking out a genuinely early and pointed feminist critique exposing a specific logical hypocrisy in gendered moral judgment with considerable wit and precision.

The long philosophical poem First Dream traces the soul's rise by night toward total knowledge and its fall back, staging intellectual ambition's genuine limits, human aspiration toward complete understanding meeting reality's actual epistemic constraints.

Penn's collection of some 850 numbered maxims and reflections, published anonymously while he was in hiding from political enemies in England, offers plain practical advice in the manner of Proverbs, grouped under headings such as Ignorance, Education, Luxury, Friendship, Government and Religion.

Penn's maxims carry a distinctive Quaker stress on simplicity, honesty, moderation, the inner light and the equal worth of all people, grounding practical worldly advice in a specific theological commitment to universal human dignity throughout the collection.

Johnson's Preface describes the considerable labor of compiling the Dictionary almost single-handedly across nine years, and reflects with genuine honesty on lexicography's actual limits, concluding that no dictionary can permanently fix a living language against its own continued drift and change.

Johnson defines lexicographer as a harmless drudge, one of many entries where his own opinionated wit and personality enter directly into what might otherwise remain dry reference material, a quality that has made individual Dictionary entries quoted long after their original lexicographical purpose.

Rousseau argues that children should learn from things and experience rather than from books and precepts, that reasoning comes late, and that the aim is a man who is at once natural and fit to live among others, a considerable pedagogical challenge to inherited tradition.

This treatise on education is cast as the story of an imaginary pupil, Emile, raised by a tutor from infancy to marriage, letting Rousseau work out his educational theory through sustained fictional narrative rather than only abstract prescription.

I have this day begun to keep a Journal, which I intend to labour to make as perfect as I can.

I felt a completion of happiness. I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind.

Occom, a Mohegan who converted during the Great Awakening, was educated by Eleazar Wheelock, became a Presbyterian minister and preacher in England, and spent his later life founding the Christian Indian town of Brothertown in New York.

The 1772 sermon preached at the execution of the Mohegan Moses Paul was the first work published in English by a Native American and a bestseller in its day, establishing Occom's authority as writer within English print culture.

Lessing proposes that revelation is to the human race what education is to the individual, giving humanity early what it could have reached by unaided reason alone but only much later and with considerably greater difficulty, converting apparent scriptural limitation into evidence of deliberate pedagogical design.

Lessing reads the Old Testament as a primer suited to a childish people, still requiring the promise of immediate earthly reward and punishment, and the New Testament as a considerably more advanced second primer suited to humanity's adolescence, appealing instead to the promise of a future life.

Franklin describes drawing up a chart with the thirteen virtues, temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility, each assigned a column, and resolving to give strict attention to one virtue at a time in weekly rotation while marking every daily failure with a small black spot.

Franklin admits candidly that he never came close to achieving the freedom from fault the chart aimed at, and that pride in particular proved nearly impossible to root out, since even the appearance of humility, he confesses, became for him a source of considerable private pride.

Condorcet asks by what right men, half of humanity, have excluded women, the other half, from participation in framing the laws they are equally bound to obey, and finds no rational or just answer that would not equally justify excluding some men from the same rights.

He argues that the abolition of slavery is not a matter of gradual accommodation to be delayed for practical convenience, but an immediate demand of justice that admits no legitimate exception or postponement.

Schiller argues that political freedom cannot be achieved by people who are inwardly divided, and that modern specialisation has split the human being into a sense drive and a form drive, a psychological diagnosis with direct political consequences.

Only beauty, through the play drive, can reconcile the sense drive and the form drive, Schiller argues, giving aesthetic experience unusually consequential stakes as the necessary psychological precondition for any genuinely free political order.

Goethe's title itself, Poetry and Truth, announces directly that the account which follows will inevitably blend invented shaping with remembered fact, a warning to readers that even his own apparently candid retrospective narrative cannot escape the transforming pressure memory and narrative form exert on lived experience.

He describes his friendship with Herder, met during his student years, as genuinely transformative, crediting Herder's ideas about language, history and the organic development of national culture with reshaping his own understanding of what literature could actually be and do.

All is true.

Paris, its houses, its heights, its low quarters, all of it seemed to say to him, now it is between the two of us.

Dana describes the captain ordering a sailor tied to the rigging and flogged for a minor, disputed offense, and records his own helpless fury at witnessing the punishment, unable to intervene given his own position aboard the ship.

He describes the work of curing and stacking hides at San Diego, sailors laboring for weeks on the beach in a trade that supplied the leather manufacturing of the eastern United States from a coast most Americans of his time had never seen or thought about.

Micawber declares that his own financial rule of life is simple: annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness; annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery, a formula he himself never once manages to actually live by.

Uriah Heep insists repeatedly on his own umbleness, how umble he is, how umble his mother is, a performed humility David gradually recognizes as covering a genuinely dangerous, calculating ambition to rise by controlling those around him.

Sainte-Beuve asks what makes a writer a classic and answers that it is not conformity to ancient rules but the enrichment of the human mind in a form that is at once new and old, large and fine, easily contemporary with every age.

Sainte-Beuve surveys Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and the French seventeenth century, demonstrating his criterion's genuine cross-cultural applicability rather than remaining merely a parochial defense of any single national or period-specific literary tradition.

Newman argues that a university exists to teach universal knowledge, that theology is a branch of knowledge and cannot be excluded without distorting the rest, challenging the emerging secular research university's own self-understanding at the moment that model was taking shape.

Newman argues that knowledge is its own end, most fully developed in the widely read fifth discourse, Knowledge Its Own End, pushing back against purely vocational or professional justifications for pursuing higher education and genuine understanding.

Gradgrind opens the novel by instructing a schoolroom that facts alone are wanted in life, nothing else will ever be of any service, and that children should be taught nothing but facts, planting nothing else and rooting out everything else.

Louisa, married off to the much older Bounderby with no real feeling on either side, tells her father directly that she has never had a childhood in any real sense, and asks him what he has left within her to call upon now that Bounderby's marriage proposal has forced an actual choice requiring more than facts.

Emerson describes the English as a people of remarkable physical stamina and stubborn practicality, possessing a genius for machinery and trade that has made them, in his assessment, the most formidable nation currently existing, even as he confesses genuine doubt about whether this practical genius leaves adequate room for spiritual ambition.

He records his visit to Thomas Carlyle at Craigenputtock, describing Carlyle's conversation as possessing a force and a seriousness Emerson found almost nowhere else during his time in England, a visit that opens the book and frames everything that follows against this initial, exceptional encounter.

Faraday demonstrates gravitation through simple falling-body experiments before moving to cohesion, showing through direct manipulation how the same underlying attractive forces that hold planets in orbit also hold the smallest particles of ordinary matter together in solid form.

He shows through experiments on combustion and chemical reaction how chemical affinity, the force by which different substances combine to form new compounds, operates by the same basic principles of attraction organizing the other forces he discusses, rather than as an entirely separate category of physical phenomenon.

Mill argues that representative government is the best form of government because it both protects people's interests more reliably than alternative systems and improves their character by giving them something meaningful to do, treating political participation itself as a genuine form of moral and intellectual education.

Mill argues that an elected assembly's proper business is to watch and criticise government rather than to actually administer it directly, drawing a distinction between legislative oversight and executive competence that shaped how representative institutions should actually be structured and understood.

Of Kings' Treasuries argues that books are the company of the best minds and that the English do not read, valuing wealth and advancement over education, a considerable indictment of Victorian materialism delivered through reading's neglected transformative power.

Of Queens' Gardens describes the separate powers of men and women, assigning women the guardianship of the home and of moral order, and calls for girls to be educated to fit them for it, a specifically Victorian gender ideology given eloquent expression.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

What you have got to do is to be securing yourselves in habits of industry, and, I may say, of silence, and of discretion.

Mill describes the extraordinary education his father James Mill gave him, Greek beginning at age three and logic at twelve, conducted with no religious instruction and almost no company of other children, an education deliberately designed to produce exceptional intellectual capacity above all else.

Mill narrates the mental crisis of his twentieth year, when he suddenly realized that achieving all the aims his education had carefully prepared him to pursue would not actually make him happy, a genuine breakdown exposing a specific limitation in the purely rational, calculating framework his upbringing had instilled.

Leo argues that faith and reason cannot genuinely conflict, since both ultimately derive from the same divine source, refusing the assumption that rigorous philosophical inquiry and Catholic doctrinal commitment exist in permanent, irreconcilable tension with one another.

Leo surveys the Church Fathers and the medieval scholastics broadly before singling out Thomas Aquinas specifically as the master to be followed in Catholic schools and seminaries, treating this specific historical judgment as a considered verdict rather than arbitrary preference.

Huxley argues directly that a man who knows no science is as poorly educated as one who knows no literature, refusing the common Victorian assumption that scientific training is merely practically useful while genuine cultural formation belongs exclusively to classical literary study.

He argues that the Renaissance humanists who first championed classical learning were themselves rebels against a dead, exhausted scholastic tradition, turning the classicists' own historical origin into an argument against treating any single fixed curriculum as permanently sufficient for genuine education.

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.

More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

Cast down your bucket where you are, cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.

In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.