Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas More

Education has always been a status symbol; More’s jab is that status can be hollow. “Schooled” is the tell: it suggests training, credentialing, the obedient absorption of sanctioned material. “Educated,” by contrast, carries its older, sharper meaning - a shaping of judgment and character, the capacity to weigh competing claims and still act with moral clarity. More isn’t mourning ignorance so much as calling out a culture that confuses institutional polish with intellectual independence.

The line lands harder when you place it in More’s world: early modern Europe, where humanist learning was supposed to widen the mind even as church and state tightened the boundaries of permissible thought. More himself embodied that tension. A celebrated scholar and statesman, he ultimately died for refusing Henry VIII’s supremacy over the Church. Read through that biography, the quote becomes less a genteel lament and more an ethical provocation: schooling can make you useful to power; education can make you dangerous to it.

The subtext is aimed at elites who can parse Latin and argue law, yet outsource conscience to custom. More implies that an education without inner formation produces a class of skilled functionaries - articulate, employable, and eerily unmoored. It’s also a critique of systems that reward repetition over reflection. If “schooled” people are plentiful, it’s because they’re easy to manufacture. The rarer product, More suggests, is a person trained not just to know things, but to discern what’s worth knowing - and what’s worth refusing.