Parenting & Family Quote by Susan George

"Cost recovery" is bureaucratese with a blade hidden inside it. Susan George’s line works because it strips the euphemism down to the lived transaction: when the state adopts “recovery” logic, education stops being a public promise and starts behaving like a bill. The phrasing “polite way” isn’t just moral outrage; it’s an accusation about how power talks. Technocrats don’t announce austerity as austerity. They rename it as prudence, efficiency, sustainability - words that sound neutral, even responsible - and then let the consequences land quietly on households.

The verb choice matters. “Recover” implies a rightful owner returning to balance after a loss. George’s subtext is that the alleged “loss” is political theater: governments and institutions frame public spending as an overextension that must be corrected, while ignoring who benefited from the earlier arrangement and who gets to define what counts as affordable. In that sense, the quote targets not only fees, but the ideology that treats citizens as customers and schools as service providers.

Contextually, George is speaking from the activist critique of neoliberal policy, especially the late-20th-century push (via international financial institutions and national reforms) to shift public costs onto users through tuition, “fees,” and privatization. Her blunt “make families pay” recenters the debate where reform language tries to keep it abstract: on inequality, access, and the quiet re-sorting of opportunity by income.