"I never cared what kind of grade I got"
About this Quote
A line like "I never cared what kind of grade I got" is less anti-intellectual than anti-credential. Coming from Shelby Foote - the novelist-turned-Civil-War raconteur who wore erudition like a well-cut suit but distrusted institutions - it reads as a quiet declaration of independence from the modern merit machine. The point isn’t that school is useless; it’s that the scoreboard isn’t the game.
Foote’s authority never came from academic gatekeeping. He wasn’t a tenured historian polishing footnotes for peer review; he was a writer building narrative gravity, betting that if you could make the past feel alive, readers would follow you into it. That helps explain the subtext: grades measure compliance and performance under someone else’s rubric, while Foote’s artistic identity is built around an internal standard - taste, voice, stamina, the long solitude of reading. The remark implies a hierarchy of values where curiosity outranks evaluation, and where learning is private, almost stubbornly self-directed.
There’s also a faint Southern aristocratic shrug in it: the confidence (or posture) that one’s worth isn’t up for institutional adjudication. In a culture increasingly addicted to metrics, Foote’s sentence still lands because it exposes how easily assessment becomes identity. He’s not offering a study tip; he’s rejecting a whole moral economy in which grades stand in for character. The irony is that the stance sounds cavalier, yet it takes discipline to live by it: if you don’t care about grades, you’d better care about the work.
Foote’s authority never came from academic gatekeeping. He wasn’t a tenured historian polishing footnotes for peer review; he was a writer building narrative gravity, betting that if you could make the past feel alive, readers would follow you into it. That helps explain the subtext: grades measure compliance and performance under someone else’s rubric, while Foote’s artistic identity is built around an internal standard - taste, voice, stamina, the long solitude of reading. The remark implies a hierarchy of values where curiosity outranks evaluation, and where learning is private, almost stubbornly self-directed.
There’s also a faint Southern aristocratic shrug in it: the confidence (or posture) that one’s worth isn’t up for institutional adjudication. In a culture increasingly addicted to metrics, Foote’s sentence still lands because it exposes how easily assessment becomes identity. He’s not offering a study tip; he’s rejecting a whole moral economy in which grades stand in for character. The irony is that the stance sounds cavalier, yet it takes discipline to live by it: if you don’t care about grades, you’d better care about the work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Student |
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