No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold.
Joseph CampbellRead
The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)
Interpretation
What this quote means
Education should focus on drawing out inherent potential rather than just filling minds with facts.
Joseph Campbell emphasizes that the true purpose of education goes beyond simply providing information; it is about nurturing and developing individuals' inherent abilities. The term 'educere' suggests that education should lead students to discover their own strengths and insights, fostering critical thinking and personal growth instead of just rote memorization and indoctrination.
Themes
EducationLearningGrowthPotentialIndoctrination
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about reforming the education system.
More from Joseph Campbell
All quotes →Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.
Joseph CampbellRead
Christianity isn’t moving people’s lives today. What’s moving people’s lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It’s a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn’t even an ideal that anybody’s fighting for.
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Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end. The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth—that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.
Joseph CampbellRead
The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
Joseph CampbellRead
And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined?
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I had an American journalist say to me, "Is it true you wrote the whole of the first novel on napkins?" I was tempted to say, "On teabags, I used to save them.
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Children who are respected learn respect. Children who are cared for learn to care for those weaker than themselves. Children who are loved for what they are cannot learn intolerance. In an environment such as this, they will develop their own ideals, which can be nothing other than humane, since they grew out of the experience of love.
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I was really lucky because I went to an all-girl school, and that single-sex education really helped me because I really learned to bond with women and to not compete with or compare myself as much because we were all allowed to be ourselves and be unique and kind of have our unique strengths.
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Some people there are who, being grown; forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child.
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Through books and photographs, I saw a world that was not my own - and I realized that there was another world. That's why I'm concerned about education, because it helps our children see other worlds.
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Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.
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