Parenting & Family Quote by Joseph Wood Krutch

Nothing punctures the self-importance of “the experts” like a single, uncooperative child. Krutch’s line is a neat needle aimed at the prestige economy of institutions: it’s easier to run a glossy “institute for the study of child guidance” than to do the messy, humiliating, daily work of helping one actual kid become tolerable company. The joke lands because it reverses the expected hierarchy. We’re supposed to believe the institute is the hard part - the budgets, the credentials, the research. Krutch says the opposite: administration can be a kind of escape hatch, a way to look busy while reality stays unsolved.

The word “brat” does real work here. It’s blunt, ungentlemanly, a refusal of the sanitized language that professionalizes childhood. “Child guidance” sounds like a pamphlet; “brat” sounds like dinner at home. That contrast is the subtext: the distance between theory and lived experience, between the moral authority of expertise and the stubborn particularity of people.

Context matters, too. Krutch wrote in a century increasingly enamored with social science, therapeutic rhetoric, and committees designed to rationalize human behavior. As an environmentalist and cultural critic, he often distrusted the modern habit of substituting systems for wisdom. The line isn’t anti-knowledge so much as anti-pretense: it warns that institutions can become machines for producing reports and reputations, while the actual work - changing habits, building character, facing limits - remains hard, personal, and resistant to being “studied” into submission.