Education Quote by William Glasser

Glasser’s line is a provocation disguised as a reassurance: stop chasing the numbers and the numbers will follow. The phrase “teaching for competence” yanks education away from its most common modern role-playing game - perform for the rubric, forget the content - and pushes it toward a clinical, outcomes-first model rooted in mastery. He’s not praising rigor for rigor’s sake; he’s arguing that real learning is measurable precisely because it’s usable.

The grenade is “eliminating schooling.” Glasser isn’t fantasizing about closing buildings. He’s attacking “schooling” as an institutional habit: seat time, compliance, sorting, and the quiet deal that kids will trade curiosity for credits. In the 1990s and 2000s, when test-based accountability hardened into policy, this distinction mattered. Reform rhetoric promised higher standards; Glasser’s counterclaim is that standards become theater when students aren’t allowed to feel competent, autonomous, and known.

“Connecting with students” is the human lever in his psychology: motivation isn’t extracted with pressure; it’s built through relationships that make effort feel worthwhile. The subtext is slightly scolding to policymakers and administrators: you can buy new tests, new curricula, new tech, and still get the same fragile gains if students experience school as something done to them.

The sly rhetorical move is the ending: “the test scores will improve.” He borrows the language of the accountability era to undermine it, offering a bargain. Treat students like developing agents rather than data points, and even the system’s favorite metric will have to concede you were right.