Wealth & Money Quote by Emma Goldman

Goldman smuggles a revolutionary thesis into the softest possible packaging: the child as a vault of untapped solidarity. The line is deliberately inverted from the usual adult sermonizing about “teaching kids to be good.” She insists the raw materials are already there. If cruelty and selfishness show up later, that’s not “human nature” revealing itself; it’s culture doing damage.

The key move is her choice of nouns: “wealth,” “treasure,” “unlock.” These are economic metaphors aimed at an economic system. Goldman spent her life attacking institutions that treat people as units of labor and obedience. Here, she reframes education as the opposite of factory training. “True education” isn’t moralizing or discipline for its own sake; it’s a kind of liberation work, a careful refusal to brick up whatever tenderness a child arrives with.

The subtext lands hardest on the adult world. “No one has yet realized” is an indictment: parents, teachers, clergy, and the state have looked at children and seen property, blank slates, future citizens, future workers. Goldman demands we see them as already-human, already capable of fellow-feeling, and therefore already dangerous to authoritarian arrangements that depend on competition, punishment, and hierarchy.

Context matters: writing in an era of industrial schooling, child labor, and social stratification, Goldman treats sympathy as political infrastructure. Unlocking it isn’t sentimental. It’s how you grow people who won’t accept domination as normal, because they can still recognize one another.