Education Quote by Ron Silver

Ron Silver is puncturing a comfortable myth the arts love to sell themselves: that craft can be certified. The line is politely phrased, but the intent is blunt. Training, degrees, “tremendous” educational pedigree - none of it guarantees the one thing acting actually demands: believable human presence under pressure. By putting “not turn out to be terribly good” next to “people that I admire quite a bit,” he treats outcomes, not credentials, as the only honest scoreboard.

The subtext is less anti-intellectual than anti-status. Silver isn’t dismissing technique; he’s rejecting the idea that technique is the whole job. Acting is a strange profession where the resume can be impeccable and the work still feel airtight, mannered, emotionally pre-planned. Meanwhile the untrained performer might arrive with something schools struggle to teach: instinct, risk tolerance, a voice that hasn’t been sanded into “correctness,” a lived understanding of power, shame, charm, fear. In other words, a usable interior life.

Context matters: Silver worked across theater, film, and TV at a moment when acting pedagogy (Method, conservatory prestige, credentialism in casting) carried real cultural weight. His comment reads as both a defense of outsiders and a quiet warning to insiders. Formal education can produce fluency, even polish, but also an anxiety to perform “good acting” rather than tell the truth. Admiration, in his framing, belongs to the rare performer who makes training invisible - or makes lack of it irrelevant.