Education Quote by E. L. Konigsburg

Konigsburg draws a quiet line between education as acquisition and education as inhabitation. The first sentence grants the dutiful rhythm of learning "a great deal" - the day-by-day grind of inputs. Then she pivots to something more bodily and less measurable: letting "what is already in you" swell up until it "touch[es] everything". That verb choice matters. "Swell" suggests pressure, not ease; it implies the mind needs unscheduled room for connections to form, for private meaning to take up space. Learning, in her framing, is less a funnel than a tide.

The subtext is a critique of a culture that treats knowledge like a pantry: stock it, label it, move on. Konigsburg worries about the person who becomes an overfurnished attic - full, noisy, and oddly unusable. Facts "rattle" when they're unintegrated, when they're not metabolized into judgment, imagination, or ethics. The image is almost comic in its annoyance: information as loose change in your pockets, proof you have it, evidence you can't spend it.

Contextually, this fits Konigsburg's larger project as a children's author who never patronized children. Her books often celebrate the inward life - the kid who observes, doubts, rearranges. She's defending the ungraded day: reflection, play, wandering attention. Not anti-intellectual, anti-hoarding. Knowledge isn't the enemy; knowledge without digestion is.