Faith & Spirit Quote by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The line lands like a polite sentence with a knife hidden inside it: a mock prayer that exposes how social “education” often functions as crowd control. Shelley frames the demand for conformity as a devotional impulse - “Oh, my God” - suggesting it isn’t just habit but a quasi-religious panic. Independent thought threatens the fragile architecture of class, gender roles, and reputations; better, the speaker implies, to train a mind to fit the room than to risk it changing the room.

The genius is in the feigned innocence. “Teach him to think for himself?” is posed as if it were an outrageous proposal, the kind of thing that gets you stared at across the dinner table. Then the reversal: “teach him rather to think like other people!” Shelley isn’t merely praising originality. She’s diagnosing a system that confuses safety with virtue, and treats sameness as moral hygiene. The exclamation points aren’t excitement; they’re the sound of social anxiety tightening its grip.

Context matters because Shelley writes in an era that loudly celebrated “reason” while quietly rationing it. The liberal language of self-improvement often stopped at the doorstep of women, the poor, and anyone whose independence might disrupt inheritance, marriage markets, or political order. Coming from the author who created Frankenstein’s creature - a being punished less for what he is than for how others refuse to imagine him differently - the sentiment reads as a warning: conformity doesn’t just limit lives. It manufactures monsters by denying people the right to become fully, dangerously human.