Education Quote by Roger McGough

Class envy, rendered in the deadpan language of the playground, is doing the heavy lifting here. McGough remembers being "put off" not by a teacher or a curriculum, but by a vegetable - a humble cabbage that becomes a social instrument. It reads funny because it is funny: the absurdity of a child internalizing hierarchy through produce. But the wit has teeth. In a single, almost throwaway line, he shows how schools sort children long before anyone starts grading essays.

The phrasing matters. "People at school" is vague, a crowd without faces, which mirrors how shame works: it rarely comes with one identifiable villain. "My cabbage wasn't as good as other people's" lands as a child's blunt comparative logic, the kind that turns difference into deficiency in seconds. The repeated "put me off" suggests a lasting aversion - not just to cabbage, but to the entire scene that made him feel lesser. Food here isn't nourishment; it's a public performance of family resources, a packed-lunch class register.

Contextually, McGough comes out of mid-century working-class Liverpool, a Britain where ration-memory and tight budgets still shaped domestic life. For a poet associated with accessible, demotic language, it's also a stealth manifesto: the everyday object is never just everyday. The line smuggles social critique inside conversational understatement, making the reader laugh, then notice what the laughter covers - a childhood lesson in how quickly belonging can be priced and how quietly it can push someone away from school, confidence, even ambition.