Motherhood Quote by John Knowles

The line carries its own quiet class map: West Virginia is where the work is, Massachusetts is where the meaning gets assigned. Knowles frames his family’s story as a kind of internal migration between two Americas, one defined by extraction and risk, the other by credentials and cultural capital. Coal is not just an industry here; it’s a shorthand for necessity, volatility, and a life organized around labor. New England, by contrast, is rendered as an idea as much as a region: the destination for people who want to be remade by schooling.

The phrasing does a lot of social work. “To them” signals that this is inherited belief, not neutral fact, and it lets Knowles both report and gently distance himself from the ideology. “If you really wanted an education” is the tell: education becomes a moral category, a proof of seriousness, with New England positioned as the arbiter. That “really” turns geography into judgment, implying that other forms of learning - local, practical, or working-class - don’t quite count.

In context, Knowles is a novelist best known for mapping adolescent formation and the institutions that shape it. The quote reads like a preface to his recurring concern: how elite settings manufacture identity, and how aspiration can be both ladder and trap. Behind the family anecdote sits a sharper American story: the way prestige gets regionalized, how ambition often requires leaving home, and how the promise of education can quietly reinforce the same hierarchies it claims to transcend.