Education Quote by Peter De Vries

Experience is the classroom everyone gets enrolled in, whether we like it or not. De Vries’ joke is that some of us still manage to flunk it. The line pivots on a neat little insult disguised as a truism: yes, we learn by doing, but a sizable portion of humanity needs remedial instruction because we keep repeating the same mistakes with fresh confidence.

What makes it work is the bait-and-switch from a reassuring, democratic sentiment to a quietly brutal diagnosis of character. “We all learn by experience” sounds like a motivational poster; “some of us have to go to summer school” snaps it into place as satire. Summer school isn’t just extra time - it’s embarrassment, consequence, the social sting of being held back while everyone else moves on. De Vries uses that sting to puncture the myth that time automatically equals wisdom. Living longer doesn’t guarantee learning; it can just mean getting more elaborate at self-deception.

As a mid-century American novelist with a comedian’s timing and a Protestant-era suspicion of human perfectibility, De Vries often treated morality as something people bungle in public, then rationalize in private. The subtext is less “people are dumb” than “people are willful.” We don’t fail to learn because the lesson is unclear; we fail because the lesson is inconvenient. The punchline lands because it’s recognizably true: growth is optional, and repetition is the default setting.