Education Quote by Lee Iacocca

In Iacocca's mouth, this is both a compliment and a corporate critique disguised as common sense. He frames teaching as the apex job in a "completely rational society" precisely because we do not live in one. The conditional is doing all the work: rationality is the fantasy setup that lets him indict the actual status hierarchy where prestige and pay flow to dealmakers, not the people who build human capital.

The line flatters teachers, but it also exposes how markets misread value. A businessman praising educators sounds like an inversion, and thats the point: he knows incentives shape what a society signals as admirable. If we were rational, we'd reward the profession that reproduces the whole system - the one that trains every engineer, nurse, machinist, and CEO. Instead, we treat teaching as noble but optional, a calling you do in spite of the paycheck.

Subtextually, Iacocca is also laundering an elite anxiety: if teaching is "the best of us", what does that say about the rest - including him? The joke-y sting ("the rest of us would have to settle") is self-deprecating on the surface, yet it keeps the pecking order intact. Teachers get moral primacy; everyone else still gets the power.

The context matters: Iacocca came up in an era of postwar faith in meritocracy and mass education, then helped drive a late-20th-century economy that increasingly rewarded finance, management, and branding. The quote reads like a rare moment where a capitalist admits the scoreboard is rigged - and that we all know it.