Education Quote by Carter G. Woodson

Woodson draws a clean, almost surgical line between schooling as data transfer and education as liberation. The phrase "mere imparting" is doing the heavy lifting: it downgrades information to something that can be ladled out, passively received, and just as easily used to reinforce hierarchy. In Woodson's hands, knowledge without formation is not neutral; it's pliable, ready to be weaponized by whoever controls the curriculum.

The subtext comes from his larger project as the historian of Black life in America and the author of The Mis-Education of the Negro. He lived in a period when Black students could be inundated with facts while being denied a framework that affirmed their agency, history, and political possibilities. "Information" in that setting is often a substitute for power: you can recite dates and still be trained to accept your place. Education, for Woodson, implies the cultivation of judgment, self-knowledge, and the ability to read institutions critically. It's not just learning; it's learning how to see.

The line also anticipates a very contemporary argument about credentialism and content saturation. Schools can become warehouses for testable fragments, while leaving untouched the deeper questions: Who benefits from what is taught? What habits of mind are being built? Woodson's intent is not anti-intellectual; it's anti-complacency. He insists that facts matter only when they become tools for thinking and for changing one's circumstances, not badges of compliance.