A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.
Interpretation
A liberal education enhances our understanding of human relationships and encourages sensitivity towards others.
Sidney Hook emphasizes that a liberal education plays a crucial role in fostering an appreciation for the intricate nature of human relationships. He suggests that many violations of these relationships stem from a lack of awareness rather than malice, and that increasing our sensitivity and understanding can greatly enrich our lives and connections with others.
In practice
Adding this quote in a graduation speech to emphasize the importance of education.
Everyone recognizes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. . . Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values. Since these cannot be separated from the human organism and the social scene, the moral ways of man cannot be understood without knowledge of the ways of things and institutions.
In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.
Tolerance always has limits - it cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant.
Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.
The easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.
The mob that hails the man on horseback, the Caesars and conquering heroes, does not retain its freedoms for long.
I don't think I prefer writing for one age group above another. I am just as pleased with a story which I feel works well for very small children as I do with a story for young adults.
They went to university because someone, at a time when universities seemed important, said that in order to rise in the world, you had to have a degree. And thus the world was deprived of some excellent gardeners, bakers, antique dealers, sculptors, and writers.
I tell my students that the single most powerful thing that we have in this country - something that literally harbors no dissent and no questioning - is the all-powerful elite narrative.
It is intolerable that around 1 in 5 of the world's adults are illiterate. How can we build equitable information societies or thriving democracies if so many remain without the basic tools of literacy?
Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.
I think that the greatest education in the world is the education which helps one to be able to do the right things at the time it has to be done.
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