Life & Wisdom Quote by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Power doesn’t just ignore expertise; it often recruits its opposite. Gerould’s line is a bleak little machine: it takes “educational legislation,” a domain that ought to privilege literacy and learning, and reveals it as a turf war where ignorance can become an interest group. The wit is in the inversion. “Illiterate people” aren’t merely uninformed citizens; they’re positioned as policymakers, and not accidentally. Once the illiterate hold the pen, they’ll legislate to make sure no one points out they can’t read what they’re signing.

The intent is less elitist sneer than institutional warning. Gerould is diagnosing a self-protecting bureaucracy: those threatened by standards, transparency, or rigorous schooling will quietly rewrite the rules so that competence is optional and accountability is impolite. “Take good care” lands like a courtroom phrase, suggesting premeditation rather than hapless failure. Illiteracy becomes not a shame to be remedied but a vulnerability to be concealed and normalized.

Context matters. Writing in early-20th-century America, Gerould is looking at mass schooling, expanding suffrage, and the politics of local school boards and statehouses where appointments and patronage could outweigh pedagogical knowledge. Her target isn’t just individual ignorance; it’s the democratic temptation to treat expertise as arrogance and to suspect education as social control. The subtext is modern: when anti-intellectualism gets institutional power, it doesn’t argue with facts. It changes the incentives so facts can’t embarrass it.