“Just as we teach children to avoid being destroyed by motor cars if they can, so we should teach them to avoid being destroyed by cruel fanatics, and to this end we should seek to produce independence of mind, somewhat sceptical and wholly scientific, and to preserve, as far as possible, the instinctive joy of life that is natural to healthy children. This is the task of a liberal education: to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community, and through the combination of citizenship with liberty in individual creativeness to enable men to give to human life that splendour which some few have shown that it can achieve.”

—  Bertrand Russell

Source: 1930s, Power: A New Social Analysis (1938), Ch. 18: The Taming of Power

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Just as we teach children to avoid being destroyed by motor cars if they can, so we should teach them to avoid being de…" by Bertrand Russell?
Bertrand Russell photo
Bertrand Russell 562
logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and politi… 1872–1970

Related quotes

Carl Sagan photo

“Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don't have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen — or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 25 : Real Patriots Ask Questions

“Treating a being as an end in itself means respecting the value of what makes it such an end. After we see that this value resides in rational nature, we see it implies that, at least in general, rational beings should not be subjected to deception or coercion. Instead, we should seek to harmonize our strivings with those of other rational beings toward their ends.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

Kantian Ethics (2008)

G. K. Chesterton photo

“There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Defendant

Source: The Defendant (1901), "A Defence of Baby-Worship"

Subcomandante Marcos photo

“We treat the children like children. It is the powerful with their war that treats them like they are adults. We talk to them. We teach them that the word, together with love and dignity, is what makes us human beings. We don't teach them how to fight. Well, yes, but only how to fight with their words. They learn. They know that the reason we are in all this is so that they won't have to do the same. And they talk and they also listen. Contrary to what you say, we teach the children that words don't kill but that yes it is possible to kill words and, along with them, the act of being human.”

Subcomandante Marcos (1957) Mexican activist

"I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet" http://www.csuchico.edu/zapatist/HTML/Archive/Communiques/etaJAN.html January, 2003

Rudolf Steiner photo

“Where is the book in which the teacher can read about what teaching is? The children themselves are this book. We should not learn to teach out of any book other than the one lying open before us and consisting of the children themselves.”

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) Austrian esotericist

Source: Rhythms of Learning

Noam Chomsky photo

“Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children['s] […] normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don't understand.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

conference titled "Creation & Culture" in Barcelona, Spain, November 25, 1992 https://web.archive.org/web/20031123171255/http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/5/7.html.
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994

“College education tends to make simple things complicated and hard to understand. What we should do is to teach our children the most essential and simple principles of life and ways to handle problems.”

Zheng Yuanjie (1955) Chiese writer

Zheng Yuanjie (2004) in: "Zheng Yuanjie's 19 years in fairy tales" on chinadaily.com.cn, May 10, 2004 ( online http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-05/10/content_329434.htm).

“What we are teaches the child far more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.”

Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926–2016) American writer

Source: Teaching Children to Love: 80 Games and Fun Activities for Raising Balanced Children in an Unbalanced World

Henry Kirke White photo

“We should teach our children to make friends with us, to communicate all their thoughts to us … by this we find many opportunities of teaching them important truths, almost without knowing.”

Henry Kirke White (1785–1806) English poet

Letter his White's aunt, 6 January 1800.
Letters

Related topics