Education Quote by Richard Pryor

Pryor frames a personal expulsion as an institutional diagnosis: “attitude,” “not assimilating.” The phrasing is doing double duty. On the surface it’s a rough-and-ready origin story, the kind audiences expect from a performer who turned pain into punchlines. Underneath, it’s a critique of how schools label defiance as defect, especially when the kid in question isn’t built to fit the room’s unspoken rules about respectability, race, and class.

“Assimilating” is the tell. It’s a bureaucratic word, almost comically sterile next to the messy reality Pryor’s comedy would later insist on showing. He’s not saying he failed algebra; he’s saying the system demanded a kind of social surrender. The passive construction matters too: “I was kicked out.” Authority acts; he absorbs the consequences. That distance mirrors how people get processed by institutions - disciplined, sorted, removed - long before anyone asks what they’re reacting to.

Then he pivots: “So I went to work, taking any jobs I could get.” No romance, no bootstrap sermon, just the blunt economy of survival. It’s also the seed of Pryor’s comic sensibility: the hustler’s willingness to enter any room, read it fast, and make something out of it. Work becomes both fallback and education, a street-level countercurriculum that teaches him characters, power dynamics, and the raw material of American life - the stuff schools often sanitize, and Pryor made impossible to ignore.