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Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Interpretation

What this quote means

True education is about teaching critical thinking skills.

In this quote, Mary Wollstonecraft emphasizes that the essence of education lies not just in the transmission of knowledge but in fostering the ability to think independently and critically. She argues that a genuine educational experience should cultivate the mind, equipping young people with the skills necessary to analyze, question, and engage thoughtfully with the world around them.

Themes

EducationThinkingMindCultivationCritical Thinking

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of reforming educational systems.

More from Mary Wollstonecraft

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
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Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives; - that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.
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But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!
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The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.
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Women are degraded by the propensity to enjoy the present moment, and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.
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Perhaps the seeds of false-refinement, immorality, and vanity, have ever been shed by the great. Weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and defections of their race, in a premature and unnatural manner, undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society!
Mary WollstonecraftRead

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