When people lack teachers, their tendencies are not corrected; when they do not have ritual and moral principles, then their lawlessness is not controlled.
Interpretation
The importance of educators and moral principles in guiding behavior and promoting order in society.
Xunzi emphasizes the crucial role that teachers and moral guidance play in shaping individuals' behaviors and tendencies. Without education and established ethical standards, people may behave lawlessly and fail to correct their improper tendencies, leading to chaos in society.
In practice
During a community meeting about educational reform, you might share this quote to highlight the need for skilled teachers.
When a man sees something desirable, he must reflect on the fact that with time it could come to involve what is detestable. When he sees something that is beneficial, he should reflect that sooner or later it, too, could come to involve harm.
If what the heart approves conforms to proper patterns, then even if one's desires are many, what harm would they be to good order?
A person is born with feelings of envy and hate. If he gives way to them, they will lead him to violence and crime, and any sense of loyalty and good faith will be abandoned.
If the gentleman has ability, he is magnanimous, generous, tolerant, and straightforward, through which he opens the way to instruct others.
In antiquity the sage kings recognized that men's nature is bad and that their tendencies were not being corrected and their lawlessness controlled.
Human nature is such that people are born with a love of profit If they follow these inclinations, they will struggle and snatch from each other, and inclinations to defer or yield will die.
I have been a teacher myself all my life. I have an intense passion to share with people. Our only salvation is in knowledge, in learning.
When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers.
We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.
Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.
You are at some point exposed to a wonderful story, and you really want to know what happens next, so you learn to read in order to find out.
Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
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