Education Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein turns the polite posture of the student into a sly indictment of the entire learning apparatus. "I could undertake" sounds dutiful, almost Victorian in its self-management, but the sentence pivots on a condition that makes compliance impossible: "if it were possible to find an efficient teacher". The subtext is a refusal to accept the standard hierarchy where the pupil is presumed deficient and the teacher automatically authoritative. Stein flips the burden of competence upward.

The word "efficient" is doing double duty. On the surface it's managerial, the language of systems and measurable outcomes, which makes the complaint feel coolly reasonable rather than romantic. But in Stein's world, "efficiency" also hints at the modernist crisis: how do you teach perception, language, or originality with inherited methods built for repetition? She isn't asking for a nicer mentor; she's questioning whether conventional instruction can transmit what actually matters.

Context sharpens the barb. Stein lived at the seam between academic training and avant-garde experimentation: educated, intellectually ambitious, then famously skeptical of institutions that prized mastery of old forms while new forms were being invented in real time. The line reads like a defense of self-directed learning, but it also carries a provocation: if you want better students, produce teachers who can recognize emerging intelligence rather than domesticate it.

It's not anti-teacher so much as anti-complacency. Stein implies that a true teacher isn't a dispenser of rules but an active, adaptive mind - rare enough that the sincere student is forced, almost by necessity, into becoming her own instructor.