“To Educate is to Free.”

Cardinal Winning Lecture (February 2, 2008)
Context: The foundation of Scotland's success - our great intellectual, social and economic flourishing - was our commitment to education. To free education for all.... We seek to build an education system that is open to all. A system that will not just benefit our economy - but will help to strengthen Scotland's entire civic and intellectual life. That is why we place such strong emphasis on ethics and values.

Book II, ch. 1.
Discourses
Variant: ...Only the educated are free.

Listen, Little Man! (1948)
Context: Every physician, shoemaker, mechanic or educator must know his shortcomings if he is to do his work and make his living. For some decades, you have begun to play a governing role on this earth. It is on your thinking and your actions that the future of humanity depends. But your teachers and masters do not tell you how you really think and are; nobody dares to voice the one criticism of you which could make you capable of governing your own fate. You are "free" only in one sense: free from education in governing your life yourself, free from self-criticism.

Source: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (1980), p. 237, “Why Free Schools Are Not Free,” analysis, (October 1948)

Letter to John Adams (1 August 1816)
1810s

Source: The Discovery of the Child (1948), Ch. 8 : The Exercises, p. 141
Variant translation:
This then is the first duty of an educator: to stir up life but leave it free to develop.
Context: This is our mission: to cast a ray of light and pass on. I compare the effects of these first lessons the impressions of a solitary wanderer who is walking serene and happy in a shady grove, meditating; that is leaving his inner thought free to wander. Suddenly a church bell pealing out nearby recalls to himself; then he feels more keenly that peaceful bliss which had already been born, though dormant, within him.
To stimulate life, leaving it free, however, to unfold itself, that is the first duty of the educator.
For such a delicate mission great art is required to suggest the right moment and to limit intervention, last one should disturb or lead astray rather than help the soul which is coming to life and which will live by virtue of it's own efforts.
This art must accompany the scientific method, because the simplicity of our lessons bears a great resemblance to experiments in experimental psychology.

"Liberal Education: Enabling Citizens to do their Duty as Free Men", Report of the president of St. John's College to the Board of Visitors and Governors, May, 1941. Hanging in Buchanan Hall, St. John's College Annapolis

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 23