Quote of the Day: Carl Jung on Education

The digital age has made parenting and mentoring feel like a constant performance: faster answers, louder opinions, endless comparison. We try to keep up by explaining more, more rules, more lectures, more “life lessons.” But the noise rarely makes anyone wiser. A quieter antidote is hiding in plain sight: “Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.”

Jung’s line isn’t an attack on guidance; it’s a reminder of the medium that actually transmits it. Children don’t primarily learn from our speeches, they learn from our nervous system. They watch how we handle a mistake, how we speak to a cashier, how we recover after a hard day, how we treat our own body and time. Our habits become their assumptions about what adulthood is.

This is empowering because it shifts the goal from “saying the perfect thing” to “practicing the next right thing.” Want to teach honesty? Let them see you correct yourself. Want to teach patience? Let them see you pause before reacting. Want to teach leadership? Let them see you take responsibility without dramatics. The smallest consistent behaviors out-teach the biggest occasional talks, and that consistency creates resilience in both of you.

Carl Jung earned this insight by mapping the inner life, founding analytic psychology and emphasizing the unconscious patterns that shape our choices long before we can explain them.

Today, pick one value you’ve been trying to “talk into” a child (or a team), and make it visible in a single concrete act: apologize cleanly, tell the truth when it’s inconvenient, put your phone away during one conversation, or take three slow breaths before you answer. Let your example do the teaching, and may your presence become the lesson you most hope they learn.