Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“Reading is the most rational employment, if people seek food for the understanding.”
- Date
- 1787
Meaning of “Reading is the most rational employment, if people…”
Reading is valuable when it feeds judgment and understanding rather than becoming a performance of remembering words without examining their ideas.
Where does it come from?
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), “READING,” printed page 49, Project Gutenberg #67466. Wollstonecraft calls reading the most rational employment when people seek food for the understanding, contrasting reflective reading with merely collecting words or quotations; this is eighteenth-century educational argument rather than a current evidence-based teaching prescription.
