"If we want our children to value education, then we must show our appreciation for knowledge"
About this Quote
Parenting advice disguised as civic housekeeping: Sherman’s line is less about children than about adult hypocrisy. It pivots on a simple conditional - if we want X, we must do Y - that turns a feel-good sentiment into an accusation. Everyone claims to “value education.” Far fewer want to fund it, defend teachers when culture-war storms hit, or treat expertise as something other than a punchline. Sherman is effectively saying: kids don’t learn priorities from slogans; they learn them from what a community rewards, pays for, and listens to.
The subtext is about modeling, but also about power. “Appreciation for knowledge” isn’t just reading books at home. In a political context, it means building institutions that treat learning as infrastructure: well-supported schools, libraries, science funding, and curricula not rewritten to flatter partisan narratives. It also means resisting the populist temptation to frame knowledge as elitism. When public figures mock “experts” while leaning on expert-built systems (medicine, engineering, economics), children absorb the lesson that intelligence is useful but contemptible.
As a politician, Sherman’s intent is strategic: he’s laundering policy through a universally sympathetic subject (children) to widen the coalition for education spending and pro-knowledge norms. It’s rhetoric designed to make opposition look not merely budget-conscious, but morally inconsistent. The line works because it relocates responsibility from the child’s motivation to the adult world’s example - and implies that the real education crisis may be cultural before it’s curricular.
The subtext is about modeling, but also about power. “Appreciation for knowledge” isn’t just reading books at home. In a political context, it means building institutions that treat learning as infrastructure: well-supported schools, libraries, science funding, and curricula not rewritten to flatter partisan narratives. It also means resisting the populist temptation to frame knowledge as elitism. When public figures mock “experts” while leaning on expert-built systems (medicine, engineering, economics), children absorb the lesson that intelligence is useful but contemptible.
As a politician, Sherman’s intent is strategic: he’s laundering policy through a universally sympathetic subject (children) to widen the coalition for education spending and pro-knowledge norms. It’s rhetoric designed to make opposition look not merely budget-conscious, but morally inconsistent. The line works because it relocates responsibility from the child’s motivation to the adult world’s example - and implies that the real education crisis may be cultural before it’s curricular.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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