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Education must not simply teach work-it must teach life.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Education should encompass life lessons, not just vocational skills.

W. E. B. Du Bois emphasizes that education should go beyond mere job training; it should impart wisdom and knowledge that prepare individuals for the complexities of life. True education nurtures critical thinking, character development, and an understanding of one's role in society, enabling people to lead fulfilling lives that contribute to their communities.

Themes

EducationLifeWisdomLearningCharacter

In practice

Example use cases

In a graduation speech to emphasize the holistic approach of education.

More from W. E. B. Du Bois

Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'
W. E. B. Du BoisRead
Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.
W. E. B. Du BoisRead
School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.
W. E. B. Du BoisRead
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
W. E. B. Du BoisRead
For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals.
W. E. B. Du BoisRead
For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
W. E. B. Du BoisRead

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