Education

“Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.”

~William Deresiewicz

“Young men and young women continue to be born with an insatiable desire to know. These marked souls manage somehow, in spite of all they see around them, to make themselves into educated persons. Literature, philosophy and the arts, religion, political theory and history become the staples on which they feed their minds. And with slight variations in diet expressive of different temperaments, they ultimately come into possession of the common knowledge and the common tongue.”

~Jacques Barzun

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

~Joseph Campbell

“. . . no matter what stage of life we find ourselves in, whether student or life-long learner, we ought to continue to ask and feed our imaginative capacities. If by doing so we could ‘dredge up,’ as Campbell said, ‘something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization,’ then we may yet herald the return of the boon-bringer—‘a personage of not only local but world-historical moment.’ Then we may find that the wasteland has at last been restored, and that the ideal of all our perennial aspirations can finally be extracted from the fog that presently obscures it.”

~Matthew Pheneger