Education Quote by Morley Safer

A veteran journalist like Morley Safer isn’t romanticizing childhood innocence here; he’s making a hard-nosed claim about how authority actually works when it’s healthy. “Often just as valid” is the key modifier: not always, not automatically, but frequently enough that any adult who treats kids as noise is missing data. Safer’s reporting career was built on watching institutions defend themselves with polished certainty while reality leaked out through ordinary people’s testimony. This line applies that instinct to the classroom, where the institution is small, familiar, and rarely interrogated.

The subtext is a critique of the default hierarchy of schooling: teachers speak, students absorb, and “respect” is mistaken for silence. Safer reframes students as witnesses to the learning environment. Kids know when instructions are unclear, when rules are selectively enforced, when boredom is masquerading as rigor, when a teacher’s mood is driving the room. Their perspective is “valid” because it’s proximate and unfiltered, not because it’s professionally credentialed.

His second sentence tightens the screw. “The best teachers” aren’t the ones with the most control; they’re the ones with enough confidence to risk being corrected by the people they’re supposed to lead. Knowing kids’ views matter is a discipline, not a sentiment: it demands listening, revising, and occasionally admitting, in front of an audience, that you were wrong. Safer’s context - postwar deference giving way to skepticism of power - haunts the line. It’s a small democratic manifesto tucked into a classroom.