For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.
Interpretation
The mind needs stimulation and inspiration, not mere information, to foster independent thinking.
This quote by Plutarch emphasizes that the process of learning and understanding is not about just accumulating knowledge, as one would fill a bottle, but rather about igniting a spark of curiosity and critical thinking. It suggests that true education involves nurturing an intrinsic motivation to explore the truth and think for oneself, akin to kindling a fire that leads to creative and independent thought.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about innovative teaching methods in education.
Sometimes small incidents, rather than glorious exploits, give us the best evidence of character. So, as portrait painters are more exact in doing the face, where the character is revealed, than the rest of the body, I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks of the souls of men.
It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such a one as is unworthy of him; for the one is only belief - the other contempt.
Come back with your shield - or on it
The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds.
For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.
Our senses through ignorance of Reality, falsely tell us that what appears to be, is. FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real
It used to take me all vacation to grow a new hide in place of the one they flogged off me during school term.
Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.
All I hope, selfishly, is that there will be real books until the day I draw my last breath.
Unless the schools provide our children with a vision of human possibility that enlightens and empowers them with knowledge and taste, they will simply play their role in someone else's marketing schemes. Unless they understand deeply the sources of our democracy, they will take it for granted and fail to exercise their rights and responsibilities.
... there is no valid teaching from which there does not emerge something learned and through which the learner does not become capable of recreating and remaking what has been taught.
If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?
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