Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
Interpretation
Education is a comprehensive process that shapes individuals both inside and outside formal school settings.
This quote by W. E. B. Du Bois emphasizes the importance of education as a holistic, lifelong process that extends beyond traditional classrooms. It suggests that education is not just about academic knowledge but also about personal development and social training that occurs in various environments throughout life.
In practice
In a speech about community development, I would say, 'As W. E. B. Du Bois once stated, education is that whole system of human training that shapes us.'
Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'
Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.
School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals.
For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
It scares me to think that one day I'm not going to be in school anymore.
I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
I loved to read, and I think any child who loves to read will read anything, including the back of the cereal box, which I did every morning.
My Bible tells me that if we train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it. I think faith and guidance can help fortify a young woman's sense of self, a young man's sense of responsibility, and a sense of reverence all young people for the act of sexual intimacy.
I have a responsibility to pass on to the next generation what I learned from my teachers, ... It keeps me young and reminds me where I came from. Teaching young artists is like giving water to a flower.
I can create as many programs and mentorships and scholarships as I want, but it doesn't change the environment in which our youth are growing up in.
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