The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
Interpretation
Emerson suggests that colleges provide resources but lack effective teaching from knowledgeable professors.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes that while educational institutions offer necessary resources such as libraries, they often fall short in providing effective educators who can guide students in understanding and interpreting the vast wealth of knowledge contained within those resources. He argues for the importance of having professors who can teach and inspire students, rather than just providing access to books without proper guidance.
In practice
A college commencement speech discussing the importance of mentorship and guidance in education.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
No country can possibly move ahead, no free society can possibly be sustained, unless it has an educated citizenry whose qualities of mind and heart permit it to take part in the complicated and increasingly sophisticated decisions that pour not only upon the President and upon the Congress, but upon all the citizens who exercise the ultimate power.
The importance of a high moral code, which is at the foundation of the Scout movement, cannot be stressed too highly.
As the growth mindset has become more popular and taken hold, we are beginning to find that there are pitfalls. Many educators misunderstand or misapply the concepts.
Real knowledge, like everything else of value, is not to be obtained easily. It must be worked for, studied for, thought for, and, more that all, must be prayed for.
Anything that is worth teaching can be presented in many different ways. These multiple ways can make use of our multiple intelligences.
From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.
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