Education Quote by Ignazio Silone

A school can be built on theories the way a barricade can be built on furniture: quickly assembled, useful for a moment, and easy to topple once the argument shifts. Silone draws that contrast with a novelist's feel for what survives contact with history. Theories, in his framing, are intellectually generative but socially thin; they produce disciples, syllabi, and sects. Values, by contrast, are infrastructural. They tell strangers how to treat one another when no one is watching, which is why they can scale from the classroom to the polis.

The intent is quietly polemical. Silone spent his life watching grand ideologies promise emancipation and deliver party discipline. An anti-fascist and disillusioned communist, he knew how "theory" can harden into a passport system: who belongs, who doesn't, who gets to speak. His line is a warning about confusing conceptual brilliance with moral legitimacy. A movement that can win debates may still fail at building a livable world.

The subtext is also a bid for pluralism without mushy relativism. Values are not presented as private feelings; they're shared commitments sturdy enough to coordinate collective life. "A new way of living together among men" is deliberately concrete: civilization isn't made by correct ideas alone, but by the everyday ethics that make institutions humane and power tolerable. In an age of culture wars and algorithmic echo chambers, Silone's distinction lands like a dare: stop building schools for the already-convinced and start building norms that can hold a society together.