"True education is concerned not only with practical goals but also with values. Our aims assure us of our material life, our values make possible our spiritual life"
About this Quote
Mies van der Rohe draws a sharp line between training and education. Practical aims teach us how to make, measure, and manage; values teach us why it matters and what limits we should honor. Aims secure livelihoods and solve concrete problems; values furnish meaning, dignity, and orientation. Without aims, survival falters; without values, success rings hollow.
Coming from a modernist architect known for less is more, the distinction carries special weight. Mies pursued radical simplicity, but he was never interested in mere efficiency. His buildings aspire to clarity, proportion, and honesty of materials, qualities that point beyond utility to an ethical and almost spiritual order. As director of the Bauhaus and later at IIT, he argued that the education of an architect must include judgment, restraint, and reverence for form. Techniques change with each era; character and discernment anchor the work across time.
He is also writing against the backdrop of industrialization and the cult of progress, when schools risked becoming pipelines of technical skill serving economic ends. To say that aims assure material life is to acknowledge the value of competence and productivity. To insist that values make possible spiritual life is to claim that education must cultivate conscience, empathy, and a sense of beauty, or else it produces technicians without vision.
The lesson travels well beyond architecture. In any field, an education that prizes only metrics and marketability can churn out high performers who lack integrity, curiosity, and civic responsibility. Values do not oppose practicality; they guide it, set its horizons, and keep its power from corroding what we most cherish. Mies calls for an education that forms the whole person, so that what we build, code, heal, or govern serves life not only as a material system but as a human story worth living.
Coming from a modernist architect known for less is more, the distinction carries special weight. Mies pursued radical simplicity, but he was never interested in mere efficiency. His buildings aspire to clarity, proportion, and honesty of materials, qualities that point beyond utility to an ethical and almost spiritual order. As director of the Bauhaus and later at IIT, he argued that the education of an architect must include judgment, restraint, and reverence for form. Techniques change with each era; character and discernment anchor the work across time.
He is also writing against the backdrop of industrialization and the cult of progress, when schools risked becoming pipelines of technical skill serving economic ends. To say that aims assure material life is to acknowledge the value of competence and productivity. To insist that values make possible spiritual life is to claim that education must cultivate conscience, empathy, and a sense of beauty, or else it produces technicians without vision.
The lesson travels well beyond architecture. In any field, an education that prizes only metrics and marketability can churn out high performers who lack integrity, curiosity, and civic responsibility. Values do not oppose practicality; they guide it, set its horizons, and keep its power from corroding what we most cherish. Mies calls for an education that forms the whole person, so that what we build, code, heal, or govern serves life not only as a material system but as a human story worth living.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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