Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that institutions often resist those who challenge the status quo, such as exceptional individuals like geniuses or saints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects the tension between individual brilliance and established institutions. It implies that colleges, much like religious communities, may view innovative thinkers as threats to their traditional structures and norms. Rather than embracing unique insights or transformative ideas, they may instead prefer conformity, leading to an environment that can stifle creativity and exceptional talent.
In practice
In a graduation speech to encourage students to embrace their uniqueness.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.
To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.
I walk around the school hallways and look at the people. I look at the teachers and wonder why they're here. If they like their jobs. Or us. And I wonder how smart they were when they were fifteen. Not in a mean way. In a curious way. It's like looking at all the students and wondering who's had their heart broken that day, and how they are able to cope with having three quizzes and a book report due on top of that. Or wondering who did the heart breaking. And wondering why.
Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.
I have been long sensible that while I was endeavoring to render our country the greatest of all services, that of regenerating the public education, and placing our rising generation on the level of our sister states (which they have proudly held heretofore), I was discharging the odious function of a physician pouring medicine down the throat of a patient insensible of needing it.
I believe that access to a university education should be based on the ability to learn, not what people can afford. I think there is no more nauseating a sight than politicians pulling up the ladder of opportunity behind them.
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