Education Quote by Michael Korda

Korda’s line lands with a neat provocation: if you come to art looking for instruction manuals, you’re already misreading the assignment. “Art teaches nothing” is a slap at the schoolroom expectation that novels (or paintings, or films) exist to deliver tidy morals, political programs, or self-help takeaways. He’s pushing back against the bureaucratic impulse to grade art by its “message,” as if meaning were a worksheet answer key.

Then he swerves: “except the significance of life.” The exception isn’t a contradiction so much as a reframing of what learning looks like. Art doesn’t teach in the way a textbook teaches; it teaches by recalibrating attention. A good novel doesn’t hand you facts, it changes what feels worth noticing: the weight of a gesture, the cruelty inside a polite sentence, the way desire rewires ethics. Significance isn’t information; it’s hierarchy. Art reorganizes the mind’s priorities.

The subtext is slightly combative, even defensive, coming from a novelist whose medium is forever being asked to justify itself: What’s the point? What does it do? Korda answers: it makes life legible without reducing it. In a culture that wants art to be either entertainment or propaganda, he stakes out a third lane: art as a meaning-making technology, less sermon than lens. The “nothing” is bait; the “significance” is the real claim, and it’s bigger than any lesson plan.