Success Quote by Paul Wellstone

Wellstone’s line lands like a mission statement disguised as common sense: education and democracy aren’t parallel institutions, they’re co-dependent engines for making people more fully human. Coming from a progressive senator who made his career on populist, small-d democratic organizing, the intent is pointed. He’s not praising “school” in the abstract; he’s arguing for public investment as civic infrastructure, as essential as voting rights or fair labor laws. Education is framed less as job training and more as capacity-building: the ability to think critically, speak publicly, organize collectively, and refuse being managed.

The subtext takes a swipe at a narrower, market-only view of schooling. “Human capabilities” is a deliberately expansive phrase - not test scores, not credentials, not workforce readiness. It smuggles in moral and political claims: that people contain unrealized potential; that society has obligations to unlock it; that democracy collapses when citizens are treated as consumers or data points instead of agents. Read closely, it’s also an argument against cynicism. Democracy isn’t just a procedure for counting preferences; it’s a culture that must be taught, practiced, and protected.

Context matters: Wellstone spoke from an era of bipartisan flirtation with austerity and technocratic “reform,” when public goods were increasingly justified only in economic terms. He answers with a different yardstick. The measure of a country isn’t GDP or even orderliness; it’s how far it lets ordinary people grow into their own power.