"It is hard to convince a high-school student that he will encounter a lot of problems more difficult than those of algebra and geometry"
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The barb lands because it flatters and deflates at the same time. Howe aims his wit at a very specific adolescent illusion: the conviction that today’s struggle is the whole of life, and that the hardest thing anyone can ask of you is to factor a polynomial before lunch. Algebra and geometry aren’t random examples; they’re the emblematic high-school ordeals, packaged as objective, solvable, and graded. You either get the right answer or you don’t. That clean logic is exactly what adulthood withholds.
Howe’s intent isn’t to dunk on teenagers so much as to puncture a culture that treats schooling as the apex of difficulty. The subtext is a warning about miscalibrated stress. When you’re sixteen, a bad test score can feel like a verdict on your future because the institution trains you to read it that way. Howe suggests the opposite: the world will present problems with no answer key, no fair rubric, and no guarantee that effort yields reward. Relationships, money, illness, ethical compromise, grief, boredom - these don’t resolve through neat steps, and they don’t announce themselves with chapter numbers.
Context matters: Howe, a newspaper man from an era that prized plainspoken moral observation, writes with a newsroom realism. He’s allergic to melodrama, so he uses understatement: “hard to convince” instead of “impossible,” “a lot of problems” instead of a tragic list. The line’s quiet cynicism does the work. It reads like a grown-up trying not to sound like a grown-up, knowing full well that the lesson only arrives when life assigns it.
Howe’s intent isn’t to dunk on teenagers so much as to puncture a culture that treats schooling as the apex of difficulty. The subtext is a warning about miscalibrated stress. When you’re sixteen, a bad test score can feel like a verdict on your future because the institution trains you to read it that way. Howe suggests the opposite: the world will present problems with no answer key, no fair rubric, and no guarantee that effort yields reward. Relationships, money, illness, ethical compromise, grief, boredom - these don’t resolve through neat steps, and they don’t announce themselves with chapter numbers.
Context matters: Howe, a newspaper man from an era that prized plainspoken moral observation, writes with a newsroom realism. He’s allergic to melodrama, so he uses understatement: “hard to convince” instead of “impossible,” “a lot of problems” instead of a tragic list. The line’s quiet cynicism does the work. It reads like a grown-up trying not to sound like a grown-up, knowing full well that the lesson only arrives when life assigns it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Student |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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