Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self reliant enough to be free.
Interpretation
Learning is essential for personal freedom and self-reliance.
In this quote, Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasizes that the ability to learn freely is crucial for individuals to develop the independence necessary for true freedom. He suggests that when people have the opportunity and freedom to educate themselves, they become more self-sufficient and capable of navigating their own lives without undue reliance on others.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education in a democratic society.
There has been one persistent theme through all Axis propaganda. This theme has been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power - but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite and work and fight. ... Let them tell that to the Marines!
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?
To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.
The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.
It is easier for a tutor to command than to teach.
The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.
History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.
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