Childhood and Youth Are No Time to Get An Education

"...you can set no store by your education in childhood and youth, no matter how good it was.  Childhood and youth are no time to get an education.  They are the time to get ready to get an education.  The most that we can hope for from these uninteresting and chaotic periods of life is that during them we shall be set on the right path, the path of realizing our human possibilities through intellectual effort and aesthetic appreciation.  The great issues, now issues of life and death for civilization, call for mature minds."

"There is a simple test of this.  Take any great book that you read in school or college and have not read since.  Read it again.  Your impression that you understood it will at once be corrected.  Think what it means, for instance, to read Macbeth at sixteen in contrast to reading it at thirty-five.  We can understand Macbeth as Shakespeare meant us to understand it only when we have had some experience, vicarious or otherwise, of marriage and ambition.  To read great books, if we read them at all , in childhood and youth and never read them again is never to understand them."  (The Great Conversation, The Substance of a Liberal Education by Robert M. Hutchins, The Great Books of the Western World v. 1,  p.76, emphasis added)