Taught from 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.
Mary WollstonecraftRead
Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True education is about teaching critical thinking skills.
In this quote, Mary Wollstonecraft emphasizes that the essence of education lies not just in the transmission of knowledge but in fostering the ability to think independently and critically. She argues that a genuine educational experience should cultivate the mind, equipping young people with the skills necessary to analyze, question, and engage thoughtfully with the world around them.
Themes
EducationThinkingMindCultivationCritical Thinking
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of reforming educational systems.
More from Mary Wollstonecraft
All quotes βMake women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives; - that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.
Mary WollstonecraftRead
But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!
Mary WollstonecraftRead
The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.
Mary WollstonecraftRead
Women are degraded by the propensity to enjoy the present moment, and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.
Mary WollstonecraftRead
Perhaps the seeds of false-refinement, immorality, and vanity, have ever been shed by the great. Weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and defections of their race, in a premature and unnatural manner, undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society!
Mary WollstonecraftRead
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Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now?
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The tools which would teach men their own use would be beyond price.
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Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.
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Students throughout the totalitarian world risk life and limb for freedom of expression, many American college students are demanding that big brother restrict their freedom of speech on campus. This demand for enhanced censorship is not emanating only from the usual corner - the know-nothing fundamentalist right - it is coming from the radical, and increasingly not-so-radical left as well.
Alan DershowitzRead
But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.
Ray BradburyRead