Education Quote by Maurice Hinchey

A deceptively plainspoken line that smuggles in a whole philosophy of government: not merely that education is good, but that the state has a duty to remove the “can’t” from “can’t afford it.” Hinchey’s key move is the phrase “who wants to,” which frames schooling as both a right and a choice. It’s a political inoculation: he’s not mandating a particular life path, he’s insisting the path be open. In American rhetoric, that’s the sweet spot where egalitarian policy can be sold as individual freedom.

Calling education “the best resource we have” also flips the usual budget language. Schools aren’t a cost center; they’re capital. The subtext is a rebuke to austerity-era thinking that treats public spending as indulgence and taxes as theft. By elevating education above natural resources or military strength, Hinchey aligns with a New Deal-to-Great Society tradition: the country’s competitive edge and civic health come from human development, not just extraction or enforcement.

The context is late-20th-century and early-2000s politics, when “college for all” was colliding with rising tuition, student debt, and widening inequality. Hinchey, a progressive New York Democrat, is speaking into a state where public higher ed and union-era mobility were being strained by neoliberal pressure. The sentence works because it’s aspirational without being fuzzy: it turns opportunity into infrastructure, and it makes a moral claim sound like pragmatic self-interest.