Education Quote by Ninette de Valois

De Valois isn’t offering a sentimental ode to tradition; she’s laying out a survival strategy for an art form that can fossilize as easily as it can flourish. The phrasing is bluntly hierarchical: "First of all, the most important" lands like a rehearsal-room directive, not a salon aphorism. Ballet, in her world, isn’t saved by reverence. It’s saved by ruthless selection.

Her intent sits in the tension between "learn" and "watch". Learn everything good that has survived: technique, discipline, musicality, the hard-won solutions passed hand to hand across generations. But watch the bad - carefully. That adverb matters. She’s warning against both lazy nostalgia and lazy rebellion. Bad habits in ballet often wear the costume of legitimacy: outdated teaching methods, romanticized suffering, rigid hierarchies, the brittle idea that tradition is automatically truth because it’s old.

The subtext is governance. De Valois, as a builder of institutions (she helped shape what became the Royal Ballet), knew that culture isn’t just made onstage; it’s made in studios, in who gets trained, in what gets rewarded. "Throw it out" is an unusually unsentimental verb for someone associated with classical refinement. It’s the language of editing, not worship - implying that heritage is a toolbox, not a shrine.

Contextually, coming from a dancer born in 1898 who lived through radical shifts in modernism, war, and national cultural policy, the line reads like a manifesto for continuity without complacency: keep what works, discard what harms, and don’t confuse longevity with virtue.