Education Quote by Gilbert Hernandez

School is where difference gets audited. Gilbert Hernandez’s line lands with the blunt clarity of someone looking back at childhood and recognizing the exact institution that taught him to feel “other.” The phrasing matters: “It wasn’t until” pins abnormality not as an innate condition but as a lesson learned. And “we realised” makes it collective, a shared discovery among kids who were fine until a system started sorting them.

As an artist whose work (especially in Love and Rockets) is steeped in Chicano life, punk scenes, and outsider intimacy, Hernandez is pointing at the quiet violence of normalization. School doesn’t just teach algebra; it manufactures the categories that make a kid scan their clothes, their accent, their family, their tastes, their body, then file the results under wrong. “Abnormal” is a bureaucratic word, almost medical, and that’s the sting: it’s how institutions convert messy human variety into a deficit.

The quote also carries a sly indictment of adulthood’s nostalgia. People romanticize school as formative in the inspiring sense; Hernandez frames it as formative in the disciplinary one. The subtext is not “we were strange,” but “we were made to interpret ourselves as strange.” That’s a crucial distinction for an artist: once you understand your identity was shaped by an external gaze, you can redraw the panel. The sentence reads like the origin story of an aesthetic - not victimhood, but the sharpened perception of someone who learned early that “normal” is just a dominant style with a grading rubric.