Education Quote by Peter Brimelow

“Productivity” is doing a lot of ideological work here: it smuggles a factory metric into a human service and then declares the service defective for not behaving like a factory. Brimelow’s phrasing is engineered to sound like common-sense accounting, but the target isn’t a spreadsheet problem. It’s teachers as a political class: “K-12 education a.k.a. teachers’ salaries” collapses schooling into labor costs, pre-emptively framing educators as the main beneficiary of public spending rather than students or communities.

The intent is provocation with a veneer of technocratic realism. By calling education “the only industry” without productivity gains, he invites the reader to feel cheated, as if schools are uniquely protected from the discipline of competition. The subtext is familiar from late-20th-century austerity politics: public institutions are inefficient by nature; unions entrench mediocrity; taxpayers subsidize complacency. It also sets up a policy conclusion without stating it: cut salaries, break bargaining power, or privatize.

Context matters because the line rides on a popular but slippery story about “stagnant” school outcomes. Unlike sectors where automation can boost output per worker, education’s “output” is contested (test scores, graduation rates, long-term earnings, civic health) and shaped by inputs schools don’t control (poverty, healthcare, housing stability). Brimelow’s framing sidesteps those complexities to make the argument emotionally legible: if you can’t see productivity, you shouldn’t pay more.

It works rhetorically because it converts resentment into a simple diagnosis, then turns a moral argument about public obligation into a managerial critique. The cynicism is the point: once teaching is just a cost center, disinvestment starts sounding like prudence.