Education Quote by Lloyd Alexander

A moral anxiety hides inside that gentle phrasing: Alexander isn’t worried about what we know, but what we become. “Learn” is the operative verb, quietly deflating the fantasy that authenticity is innate or automatic. Being “genuine” isn’t a personality trait you either have or fake; it’s a skill, a discipline, a practice you can fail at. And “human beings” lands with a faint, deliberate redundancy that reads like a corrective: not just beings who function, perform, or succeed, but humans who manage to stay human while doing it.

The subtext is a rebuke to the cultural machinery that rewards polish over character. Alexander wrote for young readers, but his best work treats childhood less as innocence than as training ground. In a world of tests, roles, and expectations, the question isn’t “Who am I?” but “What pressures are shaping me into someone I don’t recognize?” The line also carries a novelist’s suspicion of shortcuts. It refuses the glamorous version of selfhood (identity as brand, authenticity as vibe) and points instead to choices made in private: how you treat others when no one’s clapping, what you do with fear, envy, power.

Context matters: Alexander, best known for fantasy, uses imagined worlds to talk about real ethical formation. The sentence reads like a thesis for that project. Fantasy here isn’t escape; it’s a lab for conscience, a way to ask how empathy, courage, and humility get built - and what it costs to keep them.