Education Quote by Martin Lewis Perl

There is a whole immigrant cosmology packed into that plain, reverent phrase: “higher beings.” Perl isn’t merely recalling respect for educators; he’s describing a transfer of authority. In many immigrant households, teachers become the local priesthood of belonging, the interpreters of the new country’s rules, accents, and hidden ladders. Calling them “higher beings” is deliberately excessive, almost embarrassed in hindsight, and that’s what gives it bite: it registers both gratitude and the quiet intimidation of institutions that decide who gets to move up.

Perl’s profession matters here. As a physicist who rose through elite systems of training and credentialing, he’s naming the social mechanism that made his trajectory imaginable. Immigrants often arrive with limited capital but high stakes; school is one of the few arenas where effort can plausibly outrun origin. Elevating teachers to near-mythic status is a strategy of survival as much as admiration, a way to teach children that the classroom is sacred ground because everything else is uncertain.

The subtext also hints at distance. “Regarded” implies a vantage point: he can now see the reverence as cultural practice, not natural law. The line nods to assimilation’s emotional bargain: you honor the gatekeepers because they might open the gate. It’s affectionate, yes, but it’s also a portrait of how meritocracy is sold - through belief, deference, and the hope that someone in front of a chalkboard can translate ambition into legitimacy.