The best and most important part of every man's education is that which he gives himself.
Interpretation
Self-education is the most valuable aspect of learning.
This quote emphasizes the idea that personal initiative in education is more significant than formal education. Edward Gibbon suggests that the knowledge and skills we cultivate on our own determine our true understanding and progression, highlighting the importance of self-directed learning throughout life.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about lifelong learning at a community college graduation.
It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.
And the winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience.
In discussing Barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome.
Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.
Natural inclinations are assisted and reinforced by education, but they are hardly ever altered or overcome.
We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.
There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If thereβs a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall.
Part of my job as Children's Laureate is to visit schools and talk about my love of books and stories and encourage them all to do it as well - to read, to write, to never be afraid of their own voice. Because we all have something to say.
Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.
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