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?
We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.
Teaching thinking for just five hours to unemployed youngsters increased employment 500 percent.
The art of medicine was to be properly learned only from its practice and its exercise.
Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.
The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period. They’re operated as holding pens—miniature jails, really. It’s only when black children start breaking out of their pens and bothering white people that society even pays any attention to the issue of whether these children are being educated.
Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible
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