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Quotes from The Meaning of a Liberal Education — Everett Dean Martin

1880–1941 United States

← All quotes by Everett Dean Martin

23 quotes

Education is training in wisdom and virtue, and the exercise of these is freedom.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Is learning a venture in spiritual freedom that is humanism, or is it a routine process of animal training?

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Common men cherish their naive faiths and ask no questions.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Standardization develops a kind of mass mind, which in mature years renders men very susceptible to crowd appeal.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Seek education for yourself and it is the search for the good life. From ancient times men have sought knowledge that they might become better judges of good and evil.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Animal training may give one the means to make a living; liberal education gives living a meaning.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Whoever is concerned about his education should be on his guard against propaganda.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Most minds are loaded down with the seriousness of their convictions.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Crowd men have no sense of humor. It is very difficult to educate solemn and opinionated people.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Moral training which does not encourage critical examination of popular ideas of what is right and good, does not tend to make men better, but only of one mind.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Every government, our own included, fights with propaganda as deadly as poison gas.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

The skepticism which has value is that which leads one on to further study and investigation. And it is characterized by intellectual modesty.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Governments and churches and ruling classes and commercial groups have always sought to get their hands on the institutions for the education of youth and utilize them for their own interests.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

There is a quality of the educated mind which may best be described as a kind of sincerity, and conversely the outstanding trait of ignorance is that of clever insincerity.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Education is emancipation from herd opinion, self-mastery, capacity for self-criticism, suspended judgment, and urbanity.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

What the state desires of education is soldiers, reliable voters, law-abiding citizens, contented working men, prosperous traders. Hence a spirit of docility and credulity, often of timidity, prevails in the school.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Education has to do with insight, with valuing, with understanding, with the development of the power of discrimination, the ability to make choice amongst the possibilities of experience and to think and act in ways that distinguish men from animals and higher men from lower.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Another method of escaping moral responsibility is to run with the crowd. The crowd never considers consequences; it is bent upon vindicating its principles at any cost. It is anonymous; in it the individual may not be held to account.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

The attitude of authority discourages the spirit of search and criticism. Popular prejudice is entrenched. Non-essentials are over-emphasized. Crowd-mindedness, rather than independence of judgment, prevails.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

I have characterized education as a victory won over one's wish-fancies and childish egoism, as the lifting of the problems of life to higher and more significant dilemmas, as the attainment of mastery. A humanistic liberalism seeks freedom as broad-mindedness; it strives for a highly civilized, urbane and sophisticated state of mind in which insight is deepened and interest is widened.

The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Everett Dean Martin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.