Education Quote by Ashley Montagu

Education, Montagu suggests, is a long, expensive apprenticeship in the mechanics of winning. The line lands because it’s structured like a résumé you can’t brag about: school, college, medical school, internship. The piling up of credentials feels like progress, then he cuts it with a moral deficit - “little or nothing about goodness” - as if the most important competency never even made it onto the syllabus.

Montagu’s intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-misdirection. He’s pointing at a quiet institutional bait-and-switch: the system claims to produce enlightened citizens and humane professionals, but it reliably produces efficient strivers. “Success” here is deliberately vague, a placeholder for grades, prestige, hierarchy, publications, income, the whole measurable economy of approval. “Goodness” is equally slippery, but that’s the point. If you can’t quantify it, modern training tends to treat it as extracurricular.

The medical track sharpens the critique. Medicine is culturally marketed as a calling, yet the process of becoming a doctor often rewards stamina, competition, and deference to authority more than ethical imagination. By the time you reach internship - when you’re finally close to actual human suffering - you may be fluent in protocols and still undereducated in compassion, humility, or moral courage.

As a scientist-anthropologist who spent a career arguing that “human nature” is shaped by culture, Montagu is also indicting the culture of professionalization itself: we train people to optimize outcomes, then act surprised when they optimize themselves. The cynicism is measured, not nihilistic. It’s a demand to redesign education so character isn’t an accidental byproduct but a central learning objective.