"It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning"
About this Quote
Education, in Agnes Repplier's hands, stops being a noble institution and becomes a kind of physics: it obeys laws, not wishes. The line turns on a deliberately unsentimental symmetry. You cannot dam a mind that is already looking for tributaries; you also cannot irrigate a mind that refuses water. That balance is the point, and it’s a quiet rebuke to two persistent fantasies: the paternalist belief that knowledge can be administered like medicine, and the censor’s belief that knowledge can be sealed off like contraband.
Repplier was writing from a late-19th/early-20th century intellectual milieu where battles over schooling, morality, and “improving” the public were constant - campaigns for compulsory education, anxieties about “dangerous” books, and a rising faith in expertise. Her sentence punctures the era’s reformist confidence without lapsing into anti-intellectualism. The subtext is not “don’t teach”; it’s “stop confusing teaching with control.” She gives agency back to the learner, implying that education is less about delivery systems than about appetite, attention, and the interior decision to make sense of the world.
The word choices do extra work. “Receptive” carries warmth and openness; “unreasoning” lands like a verdict. Repplier isn’t flattering ignorance as an alternative way of knowing; she’s warning that coercion can’t manufacture understanding. The intent is bracingly pragmatic: cultivate conditions that invite thought, because both censorship and indoctrination overestimate their own power.
Repplier was writing from a late-19th/early-20th century intellectual milieu where battles over schooling, morality, and “improving” the public were constant - campaigns for compulsory education, anxieties about “dangerous” books, and a rising faith in expertise. Her sentence punctures the era’s reformist confidence without lapsing into anti-intellectualism. The subtext is not “don’t teach”; it’s “stop confusing teaching with control.” She gives agency back to the learner, implying that education is less about delivery systems than about appetite, attention, and the interior decision to make sense of the world.
The word choices do extra work. “Receptive” carries warmth and openness; “unreasoning” lands like a verdict. Repplier isn’t flattering ignorance as an alternative way of knowing; she’s warning that coercion can’t manufacture understanding. The intent is bracingly pragmatic: cultivate conditions that invite thought, because both censorship and indoctrination overestimate their own power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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