Education Quote by Wallace Stegner

Stegner sneaks a whole philosophy of education into that modest verb: enlarges. Not "instructs", not "trains", not even "inspires" - enlarges, as if the student is a life that can be made roomier from the inside. The line quietly rejects the transactional model of teaching (here is the content, now produce the correct answers) and replaces it with something more intimate and harder to measure: the teacher as a force that expands a person's range of perception, self-trust, and moral vocabulary.

The phrase "in all sorts of ways" matters because it refuses to name the outcomes. Good teaching, Stegner implies, is partly accidental and largely indirect. A teacher enlarges you through standards you absorb without noticing: how they listen, what they bother to revise, what they refuse to cheapen, the patience they show in the face of confusion. Subject matter is almost the decoy; the real curriculum is a model of attentiveness and seriousness. The word "besides" carries a gentle rebuke to institutions that only reward what can be itemized on a syllabus.

Contextually, Stegner sits in the American midcentury tradition that treated education as character-making, not just credentialing - and he knew both the romance and the limits of that ideal. Coming from the West, he writes against the shrinkage that geography, poverty, and narrow expectations can impose. Teaching becomes a counterforce: a way to enlarge a person's possible life, even when the world is busy making it smaller.