Creativity Quote by Eydie Gorme

There is something almost offhandedly brutal in the way Eydie Gorme shrugs at an institution most people are trained to praise. "I don't like schools" lands like a personal preference, but the next line yanks the curtain back: the problem is not classrooms, its the machinery around them. In her telling, getting a child into school is not about merit or fit; its a social favors economy. You "call on all your friends" because the gate is not opened by rules so much as by relationships.

Coming from a mid-century pop singer who lived inside networks - agents, bookers, TV producers, label executives - the line reads less like cynicism for its own sake and more like muscle memory. In entertainment, the phone call is the instrument: you hustle, you leverage, you trade goodwill. Gorme is pointing out, with a performers clarity, that schooling can run on the same backstage logic. The kid becomes a booking.

The subtext carries a quiet anger: schools are supposed to be the great leveler, the place where talent is discovered, not negotiated. If access depends on who will pick up the phone for you, then the system is already admitting what it refuses to say out loud - that prestige is rationed, and fairness is a slogan.

Its also a generational snapshot. For immigrant and working-class families of her era, institutions often felt closed unless you knew the right person. Gorme compresses that whole social reality into a single, exhausted anecdote: the education game, like show business, is rigged toward the connected.