Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
Interpretation
Education is a comprehensive process that shapes individuals both inside and outside formal school settings.
This quote by W. E. B. Du Bois emphasizes the importance of education as a holistic, lifelong process that extends beyond traditional classrooms. It suggests that education is not just about academic knowledge but also about personal development and social training that occurs in various environments throughout life.
In practice
In a speech about community development, I would say, 'As W. E. B. Du Bois once stated, education is that whole system of human training that shapes us.'
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.
Only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin.
There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.
Few things are better in the world than a room full of librarians. I consider them literary heroes. The keepers and defenders of the written word.
If someone comes to you with, 'It's my kid's graduation,' you don't tell them, 'Sorry, you can't go to that.' You just don't do that. You figure out some other way.
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.
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