Education Quote by Alice Hoffman

Institutions like to market themselves as neutral machines: places that process students, manuscripts, employees, citizens. Hoffman punctures that fantasy with a novelist’s plain-spoken suspicion: put people in repeated proximity long enough and you don’t get an efficient system, you get a village. Not metaphorically - socially. Information starts circulating. Roles calcify. Alliances form. Someone becomes “the troublemaker,” someone becomes “the reliable one,” and the story of each person hardens into a shared file the group keeps updating.

The line’s quiet bite is in “whether” and the list. High school and small town are expected; publishing company is the reveal. Hoffman is calling out how adult, credentialed spaces recreate the same adolescent dynamics they pretend to outgrow. Offices have cliques; industries have gatekeepers; reputations travel faster than facts. “Everybody knows certain things” is deliberately vague, because the content matters less than the mechanism: communities run on partial knowledge, whispered certainty, and the comfort of being “in the know.”

Contextually, Hoffman has spent a career writing about how private lives leak into public narratives - secrets, stigma, the way towns and families mythologize their own members. Here, “community” isn’t a sentimental good; it’s a social force that can hold you up or pin you down. The intent feels like a warning disguised as an observation: wherever you go, you’re entering not just a structure, but a story everyone else is already telling about you.