Education Quote by Fawn M. Brodie

Domestic labor gets dressed up here as comedy so the real punch can land: teaching is the hard thing, the thing people most casually underestimate. Brodie stacks the first three sentences like a stand-up routine built on escalating absurdity. “Housework is a breeze” already reads like a fib told with a straight face; “putting up a retaining wall is a lark” pushes it into the knowingly ridiculous. She’s not dismissing those tasks so much as exposing the rhetorical reflex to call women’s work “easy” and other forms of labor “simple” if you’ve never had to do them. The joke is a trapdoor.

Then she flips the frame. Teaching, a job often feminized and therefore culturally undervalued, becomes “climbing a mountain” - sustained effort, thin air, no shortcuts, real risk. That metaphor is doing more than signaling difficulty; it suggests isolation (you’re up there with your own judgment), endurance (progress is slow and cumulative), and consequence (a slip matters). Cooking can be redone tomorrow. A class’s lost year can’t.

Brodie’s context matters: a mid-century woman writing in an era that routinely treated education as a “calling” rather than a profession worth paying and respecting. The line reads like a corrective to that cozy myth. It also has the moral edge of a biographer: she knows how institutions shape lives, and she’s arguing that the people inside classrooms are doing high-stakes, structurally invisible work. The wit isn’t ornamental; it’s a way to smuggle outrage into common sense.