Education is not about getting knowledge. It is about claiming it.
Maria Popova
The meaning of the quote
In September 1977, the poet Adrienne Rich stood in front of a room of women at Douglass College and told them they had been thinking about school the wrong way. She said:
“You cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education: you will do much better to think of being here to claim one.”
That idea sits at the heart of this quote. Maria Popova shared Rich’s speech with her readers in a 2014 essay and called it one of the greatest commencement addresses of all time.
Rich took the word “receive” apart. To receive something is to act as a container for it and to accept it as true. A container sits there and gets filled.
Claiming is the opposite. When you claim something, you take it, test it and make it yours.
Two students can sit in the same class and leave with very different educations. One copies down every word the teacher says, memorizes it and forgets it a month after the exam. The other keeps asking what the idea is for, where it breaks and how it connects to the rest of her life. Both got the same information, but only one of them claimed it.
Knowledge is easy to get now. A phone can hand you any fact in 3 seconds. What a phone can’t do is decide what matters to you, and that part is still your job.
Rich put it this way:
“Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions.”
Claiming an education takes effort, and it puts the responsibility on you. That is also where the power comes from. Nobody can take away something you have argued with, tested and made your own.
Action steps
You don’t need a classroom to start claiming what you learn. These 3 steps work with any book, class or video.
- Argue with one thing you learned this week.
Pick something you read or heard and write down 1 point you disagree with or can’t explain. If you can’t find one, you probably received it without claiming it. - Give every lesson a job before you start.
Write 1 line on what you plan to do with it. A fact with a job attached is much easier to remember than one you just pile up. - Teach yourself something nobody assigned.
Choose a topic that pulls at you and spend 20 minutes a day on it for 30 days. Nobody will grade it, and that is the point.
Nobody can give you an education. You have to go and claim it.
About the author
Maria Popova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and grew up with very little. Her grandmother read to her and let her wander through encyclopedias. Her uncle, an architect, once brought her a suitcase with a drawing kit inside. Those early gifts shaped how she learned.
She later moved to the United States for university. At the University of Pennsylvania she paid her own way, working 4 part-time jobs while carrying a full course load.
At one of those jobs, a small advertising agency, she started sending a Friday email with 5 interesting things that had nothing to do with advertising. Colleagues forwarded it to their friends, and she realized people were hungry for this kind of curiosity.
To turn the emails into a website, she signed up for a night class in web design. She paid for it by living on store-brand oatmeal and canned tuna for 3 weeks. In the early days she coded every page by hand each Friday.
That site became Brain Pickings in 2006. By December 2012 it had 1.2 million readers a month. After graduating, Popova turned down corporate job offers so she could keep building it.
In 2021, on its 15th anniversary, she renamed it The Marginalian. She has also written the book Figuring, which reached No. 5 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2019 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.
Here is a surprising fact. During her first year at university, Popova took part in amateur bodybuilding.
Her own path shows what this quote means. Nobody handed her an education. She went out and claimed it, one Friday email at a time.
Resources
- Adrienne Rich on Why an Education Is Something You Claim, Not Receive (Article)
- On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (Book)
- Figuring (Book)
- Maria Popova: Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age (Podcast)
- Maria Popova on The Great Discontent (Article)
- 16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian (Article)
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