"The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else"
About this Quote
Gardner is trying to pry “education” out of the institutional grip of the schoolhouse and return it to the messier, more adult terrain of personal responsibility. The line has the cadence of a corrective: stop treating learning as a service delivered by buildings, schedules, and credentials, and start treating it as a lifelong practice the individual must actively carry. “Shift… the burden” is a deliberately abrasive phrase. It refuses the comforting consumer model in which students (and later citizens) expect knowledge to arrive prepackaged, validated by grades, and finished at graduation.
The subtext is partly democratic and partly managerial. Gardner isn’t romanticizing autodidacts; he’s arguing that a society built on rapid change cannot survive on front-loaded schooling alone. If learning remains synonymous with school, the moment you exit the system you also exit the habit. That’s how you get adults who feel “uneducated” in the presence of new technology, politics, or cultural shifts, and then outsource judgment to authorities, pundits, or nostalgia.
Context matters: Gardner, a mid-century educator and public servant, wrote in an era when America was expanding higher education, professionalizing expertise, and treating schooling as both ladder and sorting mechanism. His “odd conviction” jab targets a cultural superstition: that learning is legitimate only when institutionally supervised. He’s making education sound less like a rite of passage and more like civic maintenance. The real provocation is that schools, at their best, should work toward making themselves less central to the student’s future learning.
The subtext is partly democratic and partly managerial. Gardner isn’t romanticizing autodidacts; he’s arguing that a society built on rapid change cannot survive on front-loaded schooling alone. If learning remains synonymous with school, the moment you exit the system you also exit the habit. That’s how you get adults who feel “uneducated” in the presence of new technology, politics, or cultural shifts, and then outsource judgment to authorities, pundits, or nostalgia.
Context matters: Gardner, a mid-century educator and public servant, wrote in an era when America was expanding higher education, professionalizing expertise, and treating schooling as both ladder and sorting mechanism. His “odd conviction” jab targets a cultural superstition: that learning is legitimate only when institutionally supervised. He’s making education sound less like a rite of passage and more like civic maintenance. The real provocation is that schools, at their best, should work toward making themselves less central to the student’s future learning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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