Education Quote by John Naisbitt

Naisbitt’s line is a tidy piece of business-world evangelism: it reframes education from a “nice to have” public good into hard infrastructure for the information economy. The phrasing does two strategic things at once. First, “no mere amenity” attacks the complacent view of schooling as cultural garnish or civic charity. Second, “prime tool” pulls education into the toolbox of productivity, positioning it alongside capital investment and technology as a lever you pull to get measurable returns.

The subtext is the bargain at the heart of late-20th-century modernization: if knowledge is the new raw material, then people themselves become the site of extraction and growth. “Growing people and profits” welds human development to corporate gain with almost no distance between them. That conjunction is the point. It makes the moral case for education by attaching it to the language that actually moves budgets in boardrooms and legislatures. It’s less “learn to be enlightened” than “learn to stay solvent.”

Context matters: Naisbitt rose to prominence forecasting megatrends as the West shifted from industrial labor to services, computing, and globalization. In that world, skills depreciate fast, credentials become currency, and training becomes a perpetual subscription rather than a one-time rite of passage. The line also smuggles in a pressure: if education is the “prime tool,” then unemployment, inequality, even personal stagnation can be framed as individual “underinvestment,” not structural failure. It works because it flatters pragmatism while quietly relocating responsibility.