Education Quote by David Eddings

A wry, compact anecdote becomes an indictment of institutional priorities. The setting is modest, a small teachers college whose mission should be to value the craft of teaching. Instead, when money appears, it flows upward. Administrators receive raises; the people doing the core work do not. The detail lands with the force of lived experience: it names a fault line that many educators recognize between those who teach and those who manage.

The timing matters. Teacher training institutions, once called normal schools, often operated on lean budgets and a rhetoric of service. That rhetoric rings hollow if the reward structure privileges hierarchy over classroom labor. The phrase three or four years sounds deliberately offhand, as though the exact duration is less important than the moment when the mask slipped. At which point signals a pivot: the realization arrives, and so does departure. The story is not about a single pay decision but about a pattern that becomes undeniable.

For David Eddings, who later filled his novels with shrewd, pragmatic characters and often treated court officials and priestly hierarchs with a skeptical eye, the lesson is consonant with his broader outlook. Institutions, in his worlds and ours, tend to reward gatekeeping more than craft. The tone here is not angry so much as dry and observational, letting the absurdity speak for itself. One sentence carries the sting of a broader labor history: wage stagnation for teachers, the swelling of administrative ranks, and the quiet exodus of talent that follows.

There is also an irony sharpened by the colleges purpose. A school devoted to making teachers undervalues teachers; it trains people for a calling it does not adequately honor. The result is a reshuffling of loyalty. When the people at the heart of the mission are treated as peripheral, they will either grow bitter or, like Eddings, take their skills somewhere that rewards them differently, and turn the experience into art.