Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that society should prepare young people for adulthood earlier by assigning them adult responsibilities and opportunities.
Eric Hoffer argues that a stable society might require the elimination of adolescence as a distinct phase, advocating for the early introduction of adult responsibilities and opportunities to the youth. He believes that this would allow young individuals to engage in meaningful actions rather than just scholastic pursuits, thus fostering a more responsible and action-oriented generation capable of contributing to society.
In practice
In a speech about educational reform, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of practical skills for students.
Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one's religion, nation, race, party or family-what is it but the visualization of that eternal something to which we attach the self that is about to be annihilated?
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.
It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.
To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there's no longer segregation in America's schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.
History should belong to all of us, and it needs to include people from different cultural backgrounds. Otherwise, it risks becoming irrelevant to children, who could then become disenchanted with education.
Praise your kids. Inspire and motivate your players with praise. Ten years from now it won't matter what your record was. Will your kids love you or hate you?
Do our children now have to choose between getting an education and dying? Some of us cannot move on and accept that kind of society.
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
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