"No one can get an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process"
About this Quote
Louis LAmour resists the idea that education is something you can get, like a commodity you pick up and carry away. The phrasing points to a deeper truth: knowledge is alive, people change, and the world keeps presenting new problems. If education truly equips a person to meet life, then it cannot end; it must keep reshaping itself as experience accumulates. The necessity he invokes is not a romantic ideal but a practical law of growth.
That conviction fits the man. LAmour, best known for his Westerns, made his life into a classroom. Before he became a bestselling author, he worked as a boxer, merchant seaman, and itinerant laborer, reading voraciously in libraries and on ships. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, chronicles years of self-directed study woven through hard travel. He revered formal schooling but treated it as a starting line, not a finish. The frontier worlds he wrote about reward people who keep learning: scouts who read tracks like texts, settlers who improvise tools and tactics, elders who carry hard-won lessons. Stagnation gets you hurt; curiosity keeps you alive.
There is also a critique of credentialism. A diploma certifies past effort; it cannot certify future adaptability. By contrast, a continuing process is a habit of attention, humility, and revision. It includes reading, certainly, but also failure, conversation, memory, and the discipline to unlearn. It treats wisdom less as information than as judgment formed under changing conditions.
The claim feels even sharper now. Technologies shift, industries pivot, and facts expire. Yet the remedy is not to chase trends; it is to cultivate a mind that expects to keep moving. Education becomes less a staircase you climb than a trail you walk, where each bend reveals terrain you could not have planned for. By refusing the illusion of completion, LAmour defends the only education that can hold up under time: one that never stops becoming.
That conviction fits the man. LAmour, best known for his Westerns, made his life into a classroom. Before he became a bestselling author, he worked as a boxer, merchant seaman, and itinerant laborer, reading voraciously in libraries and on ships. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, chronicles years of self-directed study woven through hard travel. He revered formal schooling but treated it as a starting line, not a finish. The frontier worlds he wrote about reward people who keep learning: scouts who read tracks like texts, settlers who improvise tools and tactics, elders who carry hard-won lessons. Stagnation gets you hurt; curiosity keeps you alive.
There is also a critique of credentialism. A diploma certifies past effort; it cannot certify future adaptability. By contrast, a continuing process is a habit of attention, humility, and revision. It includes reading, certainly, but also failure, conversation, memory, and the discipline to unlearn. It treats wisdom less as information than as judgment formed under changing conditions.
The claim feels even sharper now. Technologies shift, industries pivot, and facts expire. Yet the remedy is not to chase trends; it is to cultivate a mind that expects to keep moving. Education becomes less a staircase you climb than a trail you walk, where each bend reveals terrain you could not have planned for. By refusing the illusion of completion, LAmour defends the only education that can hold up under time: one that never stops becoming.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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