Wit & Attitude Quote by Benjamin Franklin

Franklin’s line lands like a thrift-minded proverb with a sting in the tail: learning from experience is expensive, but for some people it’s the only currency they recognize. The phrase “dear school” does double work. “Dear” means costly, yes, but it also hints at attachment - the way people cling to their own hard-won lessons as proof of wisdom, even when the tuition was avoidable. Franklin, the ultimate pragmatist, isn’t romanticizing struggle; he’s warning that pain is a terrible teacher, and an even worse budget.

The subtext is political as much as personal. Franklin lived in an era when public policy was an ongoing experiment conducted on real bodies: taxes, trade restrictions, imperial overreach, war. In that world, “experience” isn’t a character-building montage; it’s bankruptcy, lost lives, ruined harvests, a colony pushed too far. His jab at “fools” reads less like elitist scolding than a diagnosis of governance: leaders and publics routinely ignore advice, precedent, and common sense until consequences arrive with a receipt.

What makes the line work is its clean moral accounting. Franklin frames wisdom as something you can acquire cheaply - through counsel, books, observation - yet notes the stubborn human tendency to insist on paying full price. It’s also a sly self-portrait: a man who built institutions (libraries, civic clubs, experiments) precisely to make learning less “dear,” lamenting how often societies choose the costliest path anyway.