The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
Interpretation
Emerson suggests that colleges provide resources but lack effective teaching from knowledgeable professors.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes that while educational institutions offer necessary resources such as libraries, they often fall short in providing effective educators who can guide students in understanding and interpreting the vast wealth of knowledge contained within those resources. He argues for the importance of having professors who can teach and inspire students, rather than just providing access to books without proper guidance.
In practice
A college commencement speech discussing the importance of mentorship and guidance in education.
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?
The essence of education is not to transfer knowledge; it is to guide the learning process, to put responsibility for study in the student's own hands...[and] place people on their own path of discovery and invention.
I dream for a world which is free of child labour, a world in which every child goes to school. A world in which every child gets his rights.
Children love this idea that their brain is like a muscle that gets stronger as they use it.
Give a man a fish, feed home for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed for a lifetime.
The Arts and Sciences, essential to the prosperity of the State and to the ornament of human life, have a primary claim to the encouragement of every lover of his country and mankind.
Education must begin with the solution of the student-teacher contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.
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