Childhood and Youth Are No Time to Get An Education
>> Monday, May 16, 2011
"...you can set no store by your education in childhood and youth, no matter how good it was. Childhood and youth are no time to get an education. They are the time to get ready to get an education. The most that we can hope for from these uninteresting and chaotic periods of life is that during them we shall be set on the right path, the path of realizing our human possibilities through intellectual effort and aesthetic appreciation. The great issues, now issues of life and death for civilization, call for mature minds."
"There is a simple test of this. Take any great book that you read in school or college and have not read since. Read it again. Your impression that you understood it will at once be corrected. Think what it means, for instance, to read Macbeth at sixteen in contrast to reading it at thirty-five. We can understand Macbeth as Shakespeare meant us to understand it only when we have had some experience, vicarious or otherwise, of marriage and ambition. To read great books, if we read them at all, in childhood and youth and never read them again is never to understand them." (The Great Conversation, The Substance of a Liberal Education by Robert M. Hutchins, The Great Books of the Western World v. 1, p.76, emphasis added)
3 comments:
I love this quote! I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially as I've talked to some of my friends who send their kids to public school. They are so preoccupied with making sure their kids are "caught up" with the academics of their grade level and I want to somehow show them what their chldren are missing by not acquiring a love of learning right now, when the tIme is right, instead of wasting their time on stuff they don't care about at this time. Anyway, thanks for your great thoughts.
I totally agree! I somewhat avoided reading 'classics' in High School because I thought they were over-rated. Now, I love them!
This is exactly what happened with at least two books that come to my mind. I have read Anna Karenina three times. First in high school, I thought it was so dumb and that it didn't mean anything. Next as a 20 something. I thought that Anna was so exciting and sophisticated, very misunderstood and ill used. I thought that Kitty was boring and I hated to read those parts. Then again a few years ago. Now I am married with children, and I hate Anna and love Kitty. I finally see what Tolstoy was getting at with the idea of family.
Jane Eyre had the same type of effect. I read this book twice about ten years apart. I was amazed what perspective ten years of experience brought me.
This makes me feel like re-reading every book I have read. By the way, I don't remember how I found your blog, but I think it is great.
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