When people lack teachers, their tendencies are not corrected; when they do not have ritual and moral principles, then their lawlessness is not controlled.
Interpretation
The importance of educators and moral principles in guiding behavior and promoting order in society.
Xunzi emphasizes the crucial role that teachers and moral guidance play in shaping individuals' behaviors and tendencies. Without education and established ethical standards, people may behave lawlessly and fail to correct their improper tendencies, leading to chaos in society.
In practice
During a community meeting about educational reform, you might share this quote to highlight the need for skilled teachers.
When a man sees something desirable, he must reflect on the fact that with time it could come to involve what is detestable. When he sees something that is beneficial, he should reflect that sooner or later it, too, could come to involve harm.
If what the heart approves conforms to proper patterns, then even if one's desires are many, what harm would they be to good order?
A person is born with feelings of envy and hate. If he gives way to them, they will lead him to violence and crime, and any sense of loyalty and good faith will be abandoned.
If the gentleman has ability, he is magnanimous, generous, tolerant, and straightforward, through which he opens the way to instruct others.
In antiquity the sage kings recognized that men's nature is bad and that their tendencies were not being corrected and their lawlessness controlled.
Human nature is such that people are born with a love of profit If they follow these inclinations, they will struggle and snatch from each other, and inclinations to defer or yield will die.
A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
Knowledge is the key to stopping the spread of AIDS. Yet millions of children are missing an education. Missing their teachers who have died of the disease. Missing from class as they stay home to care for their dying mothers and fathers. Children are missing your support. United for Children. Unite against AIDS.
I went to what can only be described as a slum school in Salford - rough and full of trainee punks - but I was very lucky in that I had one inspiring teacher, John Malone, who gave the whole class an interest in romantic poetry.
... the first thing his education demands is the provision of an environment in which he can develop the powers given him by nature. This does not mean just to amuse him and let him do what he likes. But it does mean that we have to adjust our minds to doing a work of collaboration with nature, to being obedient to one of her laws, the law which decrees that development comes from environmental experience.
Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.
Too many young musicians today want to win polls before they learn their instruments.
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