Fire and Knowledge

What is taught and learned is free—priceless, but free. To make a commodity of it is to work its ruin, for, when you put a price on it, we both reduce its value and blind the recipient to the obligations that always accompany good gifts: namely, to use them well and to hand them on unimpaired. To make a commodity of education, then, is inevitably to make a kind of weapon of it because, when it is dissociated from the sense of obligation, it can be put directly at the service of greed.

–Wendell Berry, “Higher Education and Home Defense” in Home Economics (1987), p. 52