Daily Inspiration Quote by James Broughton

Broughton isn’t describing teaching as the transfer of skills; he’s describing it as a jailbreak. The sentence moves like a director blocking a scene: first he “stir[s]” (not instructs), then he targets “imagination and enthusiasms” (the combustible materials), and only after that does he ask for the dangerous thing: risk. It’s a quiet manifesto for art as behavioral change, not just aesthetic production.

The key phrase is “to do what they were most afraid of doing.” Fear here isn’t framed as weakness; it’s a compass. Broughton, a filmmaker-poet who lived adjacent to mid-century American conformity and later queer liberation, is smuggling a broader ethic into an educational setting: the self you’re protecting is often the self that’s keeping you small. In an era when institutions rewarded polish, obedience, and “professionalism,” he’s advocating for the opposite muscle - the willingness to look foolish, get exposed, make work that might fail or offend.

“Widen their horizons of action” lands like a final cut to the real point. Not horizons of thought, taste, or even “creativity,” but action: what you actually do in public, with your body, voice, and choices. That’s the director’s bias showing. Cinema, after all, is made of decisions under constraints. Broughton’s intent is less about producing artists than producing people who can tolerate the vertigo of freedom.