Education Quote by Anatole France

“Nine tenths of education is encouragement” lands with the quiet provocation Anatole France specialized in: a line that sounds sentimental until you notice how ruthlessly it demotes the machinery of schooling. He isn’t praising gold stars so much as downgrading “education” from a transfer of facts to a climate you build around a mind. The fraction does the work. Nine tenths is not a poetic “most”; it’s a petty, almost bureaucratic measurement that implies someone actually did the math and found the curriculum wanting.

France wrote in a Third Republic obsessed with producing citizens through standardized instruction, secular moral training, and examinations. Against that backdrop, “encouragement” reads like a heresy: an argument that the decisive force in learning is not the state’s syllabus but the student’s belief that they can move, try, fail, and try again without being publicly sorted into “bright” and “hopeless.” It’s also a sly critique of the pedagogical cruelty that masquerades as rigor. If discouragement is the hidden curriculum, it doesn’t matter how elegant the lesson plan is; you’ve already taught the student to retreat.

Subtextually, France is talking about power. Encouragement is permission: to be unfinished, to be curious, to take intellectual risks without punishment. That’s why the line still reads contemporary in an era of testing, metrics, and “accountability.” It suggests education is less an information pipeline than an emotional infrastructure. Get that wrong, and the remaining tenth - content, methods, institutions - can’t compensate.