Education Quote by Giorgos Seferis

There’s a sly authoritarianism baked into that question, and Seferis knows it. “How can you dare” doesn’t argue; it polices. The line mimics the voice of a state, a church, or a well-meaning patriarch insisting that literacy is too dangerous to hand out before the “proper” worldview has been installed. Reading, in this framing, isn’t a skill but a detonator. It turns private thought into an uncontrolled public force.

The barb lands because the condition is impossible: “everything else” is infinite. It’s the classic trick of power that wants to delay emancipation without admitting it’s against emancipation. If you can always claim the student isn’t ready, you can keep the gate locked forever while sounding responsible. Seferis uses the polite grammar of concern to expose the violence of paternalism.

Context sharpens the edge. Seferis lived through wars, occupation, civil conflict, and the long shadow of censorship and propaganda in 20th-century Greece. In that world, education is never neutral: regimes fear readers because readers compare, doubt, remember. A poet-diplomat, Seferis understood both the aesthetic power of language and its bureaucratic misuse. This line stages that conflict in miniature.

The subtext is also self-implicating: “teach him everything else first” hints at how institutions prefer citizens trained in obedience, etiquette, and national myth before they’re allowed the tool that might puncture those lessons. Seferis is less interested in praising literacy than in naming the anxiety it provokes: once someone can read, they can no longer be managed by a single story.