"How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it"
About this Quote
A perfect Dumas jab: velvet-gloved, blade-sharp. The line pretends to marvel at a biological puzzle but lands on a social indictment. Children, he suggests, arrive with an untrained clarity - quick pattern-recognition, blunt moral logic, fewer incentives to perform. Then adulthood arrives, and with it a curriculum of concessions: status anxiety, etiquette, dogma, and the quiet terror of being wrong in public. Calling that "education" is the joke. He means schooling, yes, but also the broader civilizing machinery that teaches people what not to notice.
The intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-credential. Dumas was a dramatist, a professional student of masks, and the theater is where society’s lessons get exaggerated into caricature. Onstage, the "educated" often speak in polished sentences while missing what’s obvious to the audience; the child, or childlike truth-teller, becomes a device that punctures hypocrisy. This line compresses that entire dramaturgy into a single reversal: the very institution meant to sharpen minds is accused of dulling them.
Context matters: 19th-century France was busy professionalizing knowledge, building bureaucracies, and treating refinement as virtue. Dumas, who navigated elite salons while remaining an outsider by class and race, had reason to distrust the way institutions launder power into "good taste". The subtext is not that learning is bad, but that education can become training in compliance - producing adults fluent in answers, illiterate in sense.
The intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-credential. Dumas was a dramatist, a professional student of masks, and the theater is where society’s lessons get exaggerated into caricature. Onstage, the "educated" often speak in polished sentences while missing what’s obvious to the audience; the child, or childlike truth-teller, becomes a device that punctures hypocrisy. This line compresses that entire dramaturgy into a single reversal: the very institution meant to sharpen minds is accused of dulling them.
Context matters: 19th-century France was busy professionalizing knowledge, building bureaucracies, and treating refinement as virtue. Dumas, who navigated elite salons while remaining an outsider by class and race, had reason to distrust the way institutions launder power into "good taste". The subtext is not that learning is bad, but that education can become training in compliance - producing adults fluent in answers, illiterate in sense.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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