Education must enable young people to effect what they have recognized to be right, despite hardships, despite dangers, despite inner skepticism, despite boredom, and despite mockery from the world. . . .
Interpretation
Education should empower youth to pursue what they believe is right, regardless of difficulties.
Kurt Hahn emphasizes that true education should prepare young people not just academically, but also morally and ethically, allowing them to act on their beliefs in the face of challenges such as adversity, doubt, monotony, and societal criticism. It portrays education as a tool that should cultivate resilience and the courage to uphold one's convictions.
In practice
To inspire students during a graduation speech about the importance of standing up for their beliefs.
The experience of helping a fellow man in danger, or even of training in a realistic manner to be ready to give this help, tends to change the balance of power in a youth's inner life with the result that compassion can become the master motive.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
I regularly take my entrepreneurship students out walking because I want to get them in the habit of noticing and thinking about what they notice. They have to leave their phones behind to learn the basic lesson: Be where you are.
Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.
What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
The sweetest path of life leads through the avenues of learning, and whoever can open up the way for another, ought, so far, to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.