Education Quote by Kamisese Mara

Mara wraps a nation-building agenda in the soft authority of the household. On the surface, it reads like a tidy list of virtues, but the construction does more than praise family life: it recruits the family as the first civic institution, the place where citizens are trained before they ever meet the state. “Knowledge, education, hard work and effort” lands like a development plan in miniature, a promise that progress is not only a matter of policy but of disciplined habits formed at home.

The pivot is the second sentence. After the stern cadence of duty, Mara deliberately restores pleasure and the body: “enjoying ourselves, having fun, keeping fit and healthy.” That balance matters. It’s a rebuttal to the suspicion that modernization is just austerity in a suit, and it broadens the definition of national strength beyond GDP to stamina, morale, and social cohesion. He’s not romanticizing the family as pure; he’s instrumentalizing it as resilient infrastructure.

Contextually, as a Fijian statesman steering a postcolonial country through rapid change, Mara is speaking into anxieties about what “progress” might cost: communal bonds, cultural continuity, everyday wellbeing. The quote’s genius is its calm domestication of big political stakes. By making education and health feel like family traditions rather than imported mandates, he turns potentially controversial reforms into common sense, and makes citizenship feel like something learned at the dinner table, not imposed from a podium.