I think Austen’s statement seems a little fallacious, because there is a difference between “instruction” and “teaching”.
A lot of people in this thread who disagree with this statement seem to do so because they perceive that they can teach love, respect, and so on, which I totally agree with. I believe that teaching has many guises, including modeling of certain behaviours and attitudes, which others can learn a great deal from. I definitely don’t think that’s the same as “instruction” on such matters, in that I don’t think you can “instruct” someone to learn about the value of compassion, to learn how to move on after having their heart broken, and so on. Of course, you could try, but I think it would probably be less successful.
I agree that there is perhaps a limited scope of things that you can learn about via explicit instruction, but immense value to things that you might learn about through teaching, whether the teacher is teaching you in an overt, deliberate way, or whether they are teaching you in a covert, or even unintentional way. With that said, because we each differ so much in what we find valuable and “worth knowing”, there’s really no way of objectively judging how well that statement would resonate with each individual person.