“Education must be conceived as bringing out the best that is within each person by making available to him all the encouragements and supports and stimulations which he requires, in order to enable him to become a loving, co-operative, non-conflictful person. A person so educated will not only be aware of what is right with the world but also what is wrong with it, and he will be equipped with both the knowledge and the desire necessary to improve it nearer that ideal of what it should and can be. A person so educated will not be a competitor, but a co-operator, a person for whom altruism will be a passion and selfishness a disorder…. A person so educated will want to improve the world as he finds it, not accepting things as they are, but having the wisdom to know what things to accept and what to change. He will not risk wrecking the social machinery by exceeding the speed limit of rational inquiry; he will not abolish anything but merely make it necessary to discontinue, dispelling fear by supplying facts and knowledge. A person so educated will recognize the strange necessity of beauty, will have a sense of personal responsibility for decency and justice, will never burn the smoke of incense before an empty shrine. A person, in short, who having had a loving order made within himself, will make loving order in the world.”
“Learning interprets, it takes the fragments of our life, our knowledge, and makes them a unity, a whole. Each bit, left by itself, is clear but meaningless. Learning interprets them, gives them significance one for another, makes out of them a scheme of life, a system of knowledge which one can understand and use…. Men come to college to study human life because they know that by studying they can make life more nearly what it ought to be. They see how crude and stupid much of living is, how starved and poor, how lacking in taste, and on the other hand, they catch the vision of what it sometimes is and what it may become. And so they set themselves the task of understanding it to make it better.
Intelligence, it seems, is readiness for any human situation; it is the power, wherever one goes, of being able to see, in any set of circumstances, the best response which a human being can make to those circumstances. And the two constituents of that power would seem to be, first, a sense of human values, and second, a capacity for judging situations.
Freedom is personal or not at all. It is achieved by those whose dignity deserves it, and it cannot be achieved without discipline of knowledge. You see, freedom has nothing to do with lack of training; it can only be the product of training. You’re not free to move unless you’ve learned to walk, and not free to play the piano unless you practice. Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at. For most of us, free speech is cultivated speech, but cultivating speech is not just a skill, like playing chess. You can’t cultivate speech beyond a certain point, unless you have something to say, and the basis of what you have to say is your vision of society [of life].”
“No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself. It seems to be very difficult for many people to understand the reality and intensity of literature experience. As for us, we can’t speak or think or comprehend even our own experience except within the limits of our own power over words, and those limits have been established by our great writers.
Art, according to Plato, is a dream for awakened minds, a work of imagination withdrawn from ordinary life, dominated by the same forces that dominate the dream, and yet giving us a perspective and dimension on reality that we don’t get from any other approach to reality.
In ordinary life, we fall into a private and separate subconscious every night, where we reshape the world according to a private and separate imagination. Underneath literature there’s another kind of subconscious, which is social and not private, a need for forming a community around certain symbols, like the Queen and the flag, or around certain gods that represent order and stability, or becoming and change, or death and rebirth to a new life. This is the myth-making power of the human mind, which throws up and dissolves one civilization after another.”
