Education Quote by Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman is talking like he plays: circling an idea, refusing the straight line, insisting that “good” isn’t a rule so much as a practice you tune by ear. On the surface, it’s a homespun ethics lesson - treat people well, seek knowledge, get “the right” information. Underneath, it’s a manifesto against the kind of authority that tells you what counts as right in the first place.

Coleman came up in a world that treated him badly: the jazz establishment that mocked harmolodics as amateurish, club owners and critics who wanted predictable changes, predictable hierarchies, predictable gatekeepers. So when he repeats “good” like a riff, he’s not being vague; he’s defining legitimacy as something you can generate through conduct and attention, not credentials. “If you decide” puts agency where institutions prefer dependence. You don’t wait to be granted respect or knowledge - you choose a stance, then you test it in relationship: “you treat someone else good.” Reciprocity becomes epistemology. How you treat people is part of how you learn what’s real.

The kicker is his reframing of learning as “information,” a word that sounds almost bureaucratic in Coleman’s mouth. He’s slyly hijacking the language of systems - schools, critics, canons - to argue that the only information worth keeping is what enlarges your capacity to hear, to understand, to act. “Right, good information” isn’t trivia; it’s the kind that changes the way you move through a room, a bandstand, a life.