The Mind Is a Fire to Be Kindled Not a vessel to be filled

Whether it is our educational systems or the presentations we give at conferences, we focus far too much on filling people’s heads with content. It is not an effective way of teaching. We need to inspire people to learn for themselves, not attempt to fill their heads with stuff.

Plutarch understood this almost 2,000 years ago when he said:

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

Credit: Plutarch

The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth.

Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself:

that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect,

but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.

Credit: Plutarch – On listening to lectures

And Antoine de Saint-Exupéry understood the issue, although the quotation below is an adaption of his original words.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to yearn for the endless immensity of the sea.

Credit: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Detailed Resources

• Article: Embodied Cognition by Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021)

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