Parenting & Family Quote by Emma Goldman

Goldman doesn’t just critique schooling; she accuses it of producing estrangement as a civic product. The line turns education from a benevolent institution into a factory of self-alienation: the child is reshaped into “a being foreign to itself,” a phrase that lands like an indictment because it implies an original integrity that authority must actively break. Her “must of necessity” isn’t rhetorical flourish. It’s the cold logic of cause and effect: train children to distrust their own instincts, desires, and perceptions, and you don’t get social harmony, you get adults who can’t recognize themselves, let alone each other.

The subtext is anarchist and psychological at once. Goldman is arguing that obedience is not neutral; it’s a method of governance that works by severing people from their inner compass. Once you’ve internalized the idea that legitimacy comes from outside you (the teacher, the curriculum, the grade, the institution), other people stop looking like collaborators and start looking like competitors or threats. “Everlasting antagonism” reads less like melodrama than a diagnosis of modern social life: hierarchy requires managed scarcity (of praise, of status, of opportunity) and schooling is where that management becomes normal.

Context matters: Goldman was writing amid industrial capitalism, mass immigration, and the rise of standardized public education built to produce disciplined workers and compliant citizens. Her intent is to expose the hidden curriculum: not literacy, but docility; not curiosity, but conformity. The quote works because it reframes personal malaise and social conflict as designed outcomes, not personal failures.