Parenting & Family Quote by Elbert Hubbard

A lot of education is a quiet power grab; Hubbard flips the script and calls it out. "The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher" is less a warm aphorism than a stiff ethical standard: if the student still needs you, you failed. The line works because it treats dependence not as a sign of care, but as a symptom of an institution protecting its own relevance.

Hubbard wrote as a turn-of-the-century essayist steeped in self-reliance and the artisan ethos of the Roycroft movement. In that context, the quote reads like a small manifesto against industrial-era schooling that trained compliance for factories and offices. The teacher isn't a foreman shaping workers; the teacher is a temporary scaffold. Once the structure stands, the scaffold should come down.

The subtext is sharper than it looks. Hubbard isn't just praising independence; he's redefining authority as something that should make itself obsolete. That carries an implied critique of adult vanity: the teacher who needs to be needed, the classroom run on charisma and control, the pedagogy that confuses performance with progress. It also anticipates a modern argument about "learning how to learn" - not stockpiling facts, but acquiring the habits and confidence to navigate what you don't know.

The gendered "him" dates it, but the core provocation holds: education's moral endpoint isn't mastery under supervision. It's competent freedom, even when that freedom means leaving the teacher behind.