Education Quote by Pearl S. Buck

Buck’s line lands like a polite sentence with a knife inside it: education, supposedly the great engine of modern progress, becomes a conveyor belt that delivers men into purpose and women into ornamental idleness. The rural verb “turned out to grass” is doing the dirty work. It conjures livestock released into a field after serving their use - fed, maintained, harmlessly grazing. Not employed, not needed, not even wasted in a dramatic way. Just kept.

The intent is not to mock women’s capacities but to indict a system that treats those capacities as socially inconvenient. Buck frames “educated” as a shared beginning, then splits the outcomes to expose how patriarchy can swallow reform whole: give girls schooling, congratulate yourself on advancement, then funnel them back into the domestic economy where their training is either diluted into “accomplishments” or used to make them better companions to men with real careers. The subtext is that education alone is not liberation if the exit routes are still locked.

Context matters. Buck wrote across cultures and decades when “women’s education” was often defended in terms of producing better wives, mothers, and moral guardians - a progressive pitch with a built-in leash. Her phrasing catches that hypocrisy in midair. It also hints at class: “turned out” suggests a finishing process, like a factory or a boarding school, where the product is released to its assigned pasture.

The line works because it’s unsentimental. No pleading, no manifesto. Just a grim little equation that makes the reader feel how efficiently a society can waste half its intelligence while calling it decorum.