Everett Dean Martin: Quotes about education

“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.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 74

Men , Education , School , Law

“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.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 43

Education , Sincerity

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

Everett Dean Martin

Preface p. vii
The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Education

“Education aims at independence of judgment. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929), p. 145

Education

“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.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 180

Life , Men , Education , Search

“Moral education is not mere drill in the ways of the herd. The good man's first duty, as Professor Erskine says, is to be intelligent. Good intentions alone do not enable man to judge wisely or behave well. The prevailing idea that one can be at the same time good and stupid has strongly influenced our education.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 180

Stupidity , Education , Way , Intelligence

“One of the serious results of propaganda is that it has caused the public to think that education and propaganda are the same thing, and thus to make an ignorant multitude believe it is being educated when it is only being manipulated. Education aims at independence of judgement. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929), p. 145

Education , Thinking

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

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 219

Wisdom , Education , Exercises , Freedom

“By the term individual I shall mean that in which each of us is peculiarly himself. I shall emphasize not what is common is us, but what is uncommon, and this leads me to a restatement of our question. In considering what is happening to the individual, I shall discuss what in modern civilization is happening to the uncommon in us. Are we becoming more common or more uncommon? Are the common people destroying the uncommon? Is the public self of us crushing out the personal self? Are we being directed more from without than from within? As our group memberships grow larger, do we as persons tend to grow smaller? Do the tendencies of the present day, mass movements, social organization, publicity, public education, emphasize the unique in man, or enhance the dominance of undifferentiated man acting as mass?”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 9

People , Education , Question , Personality

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

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 44

Education , Animals , Training

“Dr. Kallen says, "Free public education and private instruction purchasable at a price are both but the community's device to meet present needs by transmitting the past unchanged. They provide a grammar of assent, not a logic of inquiry. The mental posture they habituate the youth in is not the posture of reflection. The mental posture they habituate the youth in is the posture of conformity. They require belief, not investigation. They impose reverence for the past and idealization of the present. They envision the future as a perpetuation of the past, not as a new creation of it. They are Main Street's most powerful instrument of self-reproduction without variation…. They enable government both visible and invisible to continue by consent, for they forestall and inhibit in the citizens of the land the technique of doubt and dissent which is the necessary condition of good government and the true inward-ness of that eternal vigilance so notoriously the price of liberty."”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 75

Youth , Education , Communication , Past

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

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 89

Men , People , Education , Sense

“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.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 133

Life , Education , Problem , Freedom

“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.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 46

Youth , Education

“It is in the localities where there is least artistic appreciation or intellectual curiosity or cosmopolitan spirit, the places where people have nothing with which to occupy their minds, that we find strongholds of "morality." Where education prevails, people learn to behave themselves as a matter of wisdom and good taste. Those who are sufficiently practiced in the art of living to be able to observe the common decencies without always "watching their step," may sometimes look up from the ground and take a broader view.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 181

Wisdom , People , Education , Art

“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.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 42

Men , Education , Way , Understanding

“The propagandist merely wishes you to think as he does. The educator is more modest; he is so delighted if you think at all that he is willing to let you do so in your own way.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 29

Education , Way , Thinking

“The educator aims at a slow process of development; the propagandist, at quick results. The educator tries to tell people how to think; the propagandist, what to think. The educator strives to develop individual responsibility; the propagandist, mass effects. The educator wants thinking; the propagandist, action. The educator fails unless he achieves an open mind; the propagandist, unless he achieves a closed mind.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929), p. 145

People , Education , Thinking

“In just the measure that education aims to develop the individual with independence of judgment rather than to indoctrinate him with tradition and custom and official dogma, to that degree it separates him from the mass and is successful insofar as it emancipates his mind from the tyranny of herd opinion.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 17

Education , Success

“I use the term "liberal" not in the political sense, as if it meant half measures, but in its original sense meaning by a liberal education the kind of education which sets the mind free from the servitude of the crowd and from vulgar self-interests.”

Everett Dean Martin

Preface p. viii
The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Education , Sense