Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert M. Hutchins

Unsettle is doing the heavy lifting here. Hutchins doesn’t picture education as a delivery service for correct answers; he frames it as a controlled disturbance, the deliberate shaking loose of inherited certainties. In the early-to-mid 20th century, as universities tilted toward vocational training and credentialing, Hutchins (the University of Chicago’s famously pugnacious president) made a counteroffer: the point of schooling is not social smoothness but intellectual friction. “Unsettle” signals skepticism toward complacency and conformity; it’s also a rebuke to any institution that treats students as customers to be satisfied.

Then he spikes the line with “inflame.” That verb refuses the antiseptic tone of technocratic reform. He wants heat, not mere competence: argument, hunger, the restless energy that comes from discovering your own ignorance. The subtext is that the young already have minds; the educator’s job is not to install thoughts but to intensify their capacity for judgment. It’s a provocation aimed as much at faculty as at students: if teaching doesn’t risk discomfort, it’s probably just training.

Hutchins’ Great Books project and his defense of general education sit behind this sentence like scaffolding. The classics weren’t meant as cultural jewelry; they were accelerants. Read Plato or Darwin the right way and you’re forced to confront contradictions in politics, ethics, and selfhood. The line works because it treats education as a moral stance: a commitment to making people harder to manipulate, even if that makes institutions - and society - harder to manage.