Parenting & Family Quote by Frederick William Robertson

Robertson draws a clean blade between schooling and the harder, riskier business of becoming a person. "Instruction" is the controllable part: curricula, lessons, the manageable transfer of information inside the "schoolroom". But "education" is framed as a lifelong exposure to consequence, encounter, and moral weather. The sentence structure does the persuading. It starts with a tidy boundary (schoolroom) and then breaks it open into the indefinite span of "life", turning time itself into the classroom.

The subtext is a rebuke to Victorian complacency about credentialing and pious respectability. As a clergyman in an era that often treated religion as social varnish and schooling as social sorting, Robertson insists that formation cannot be outsourced to institutions. The phrase "given to the universe" is deliberately unsettling. It pulls the child out of parental ownership and even out of church custody. The universe, not the family, not the state, not the parish, is the ultimate teacher. That expands "education" beyond book learning into character: suffering, wonder, failure, doubt, empathy. It also smuggles in a theological claim without sermonizing: providence may be the author behind the universe, but the method is lived experience, not mere doctrine.

Why it works is its quiet radicalism. It sounds comforting until you realize what it demands: humility from educators, relinquishment from parents, and a willingness to let life teach in ways no syllabus can control.