"A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank"
About this Quote
Perl’s line lands like a deadpan exaggeration, but it’s really a eulogy for a vanished authority structure. By equating a school summons with a police summons, he isn’t arguing that classroom misbehavior is literally felony-level; he’s exposing how the social meaning of school discipline used to carry the weight of public shame. The punch is in the mismatch: “robbed a bank” is cartoonishly extreme, which makes the first half of the sentence snap into focus. If that’s the comparison, then being “called to the school” must once have felt like an indictment, not a scheduling inconvenience.
The intent is diagnostic, not nostalgic for its own sake. Perl is mapping a shift in consequences: misbehavior migrating from a moral breach in a community to a negotiable dispute between customer-parents and service-provider schools. The subtext is that institutions have lost their leverage because parents no longer automatically deputize teachers and principals as legitimate enforcers. In that world, the child learns a quiet lesson: authority is optional, reputational cost is minimal, and rules are subject to appeal.
Context matters: Perl’s formative years ran through the Depression, World War II, and the postwar period, when conformity and institutional trust were stronger, and when schools functioned as civic training grounds as much as academic ones. As a physicist, he also speaks with a systems thinker’s instinct: behavior responds to incentives. If the “cost” of misbehavior drops, the frequency rises. The bank-robbery hyperbole isn’t just a scold; it’s an engineer’s warning about feedback loops society forgot it was running.
The intent is diagnostic, not nostalgic for its own sake. Perl is mapping a shift in consequences: misbehavior migrating from a moral breach in a community to a negotiable dispute between customer-parents and service-provider schools. The subtext is that institutions have lost their leverage because parents no longer automatically deputize teachers and principals as legitimate enforcers. In that world, the child learns a quiet lesson: authority is optional, reputational cost is minimal, and rules are subject to appeal.
Context matters: Perl’s formative years ran through the Depression, World War II, and the postwar period, when conformity and institutional trust were stronger, and when schools functioned as civic training grounds as much as academic ones. As a physicist, he also speaks with a systems thinker’s instinct: behavior responds to incentives. If the “cost” of misbehavior drops, the frequency rises. The bank-robbery hyperbole isn’t just a scold; it’s an engineer’s warning about feedback loops society forgot it was running.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
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