Education makes a people easy to lead but difficult to drive easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
Interpretation
Education empowers individuals, making them open to guidance while resisting oppression.
This quote emphasizes the transformative power of education in society. It suggests that while educated individuals are receptive to leadership and governance, they also develop a strong sense of autonomy and resistance against tyranny. Education cultivates critical thinking and independence, making it challenging for oppressive forces to dominate them.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education in society, one could use this quote to illustrate how educated citizens contribute to a democratic environment.
Let the soldier be abroad if he will, he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage, - a personage less imposing in the eyes of some, perhaps insignificant. The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier in full military array...
You have no choice as a professional chef: you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes part of yourself. I certainly don't cook the same way I did 40 years ago, but the technique remains. And that's what the student needs to learn: the technique.
I was part of the first generation of girls and women to be educated and go to grammar school even if we didn't have much money. Then that generation went, 'OK, great', and went into medicine or the police, and hit this wall of discrimination from older men who hadn't caught up.
I have vowed to my God to teach the heathen, though I be despised by some.
What many students most want from college, although they would never admit it, is an authority structure. There is a demand for an authority which they can then reject; they want to be told what to do, so they can disobey. It is a textbook case of bad faith, a flight from freedom.
When I was 13, I started working in a nightclub with Ray Charles. That's the greatest school in the world, the school of the streets. Ray taught me how to read in Braille. He was only two years older than me, but it was like he was 100 years older.
The Internet lets women use words, which is their natural tool. Little girls speak in more complex, grammatical sentences than little boys do, and women never lose that superiority in verbal ability.
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