Education Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

O'Rourke lands the punchline with a scalpel: he pretends to endorse a barbaric, nostalgically authoritarian policy, then swivels the cruelty toward the adults who usually get to moralize about it. The joke works because it exploits a familiar political move - "kids are out of control, discipline is gone" - and exposes the latent sadism and laziness underneath that nostalgia. If you really miss the paddle, he implies, maybe what you miss is the feeling of power. Fine: aim it at the people who write the rules.

The specific intent is less "teachers are bad" than "policy arguments are often about status and resentment". Teachers sit at a cultural crossroads: they're public employees, unionized, and tasked with raising other people's children while being blamed for society's drift. O'Rourke knows that makes them an ideal lightning rod for populist anger. By volunteering them as targets, he spotlights how quickly "discipline" rhetoric becomes a proxy for punishing whichever group you're already primed to dislike.

Subtextually, it's a libertarian prank. O'Rourke mistrusts institutions, and public schools are a giant one: bureaucratic, compulsory, saturated with competing expectations. The line doesn't argue for better pedagogy or student welfare; it mocks the urge to solve complex social problems with theatrical, punitive gestures. In the late-20th-century culture-war background - anxiety about permissiveness, crime, declining standards - he uses inverted cruelty to force a question: if violence is your answer, who deserves it, and why are children the obvious first choice?