Education Quote by Thomas Bulfinch

Bulfinch is selling a Trojan horse, and he all but winks at you while doing it. Mythology, he argues, shouldn’t feel like “study” at all; it should arrive disguised as leisure, with the “charm of a story-book.” That’s not anti-intellectualism. It’s strategy: he understands that the most reliable way to smuggle difficult material into a broad readership is to make it pleasurable, portable, and socially acceptable as “relaxation.”

The subtext is a 19th-century negotiation over who gets access to cultural capital. Classical myth had long been the currency of educated elites, a set of references that signaled refinement. Bulfinch’s project, especially in a democratizing American literary culture, is to translate that inheritance into a middle-class format: readable English prose, domesticated into narrative, stripped of the classroom’s gatekeeping rituals. The phrase “important branch of education” quietly reasserts seriousness, making the fun feel virtuous rather than indulgent.

It works rhetorically because it flatters both sides of the reader’s self-image: you can be entertained without being frivolous, improved without being burdened. The line also prefigures a modern tension we still argue about in “edutainment” and prestige pop culture: learning that refuses to announce itself as learning. Bulfinch doesn’t apologize for pleasure; he weaponizes it, insisting that the story-book is not the opposite of education but one of its most effective delivery systems.