Education Quote by William Godwin

Godwin is doing something sly here: he flatters the teacher while quietly dethroning him. The line starts with a premise that sounds almost polite - education should not turn a student into a "mere copy" - then pivots into a bracing claim about what real learning looks like: divergence. If wide reading sends the pupil down "new trains of thinking", that isn't a glitch in the system. Its the system working.

The intent is reformist, but the subtext is borderline insurgent. In late-18th-century Britain, education often meant indoctrination: church catechism, classical drills, inherited hierarchies reproduced through deference. Godwin, a radical Enlightenment thinker and political dissenter, frames intellectual independence not as adolescent rebellion but as the ethical end of pedagogy. He chooses the word "rejoiced" carefully. Hes not merely tolerating the student's departure; he's insisting we celebrate it. That emotional cue matters because it recodes a teachers usual anxiety - loss of authority, loss of influence - as a failure of imagination.

"Various reading" also carries a quiet political charge. A broad, self-directed library undermines gatekeepers: the tutor, the pulpit, the state. In Godwin's world, books are not just sources of knowledge; they're devices for unmaking conformity. The sentence models what it advocates: long, balanced clauses that refuse a single, final answer, moving by reasoning rather than decree. Education, for Godwin, is less about transmission than about ignition. The point isn't to produce replicas. Its to produce thinkers who can outgrow the people who taught them.