Education Quote by Florence King

King lands the punchline with a simile so macabre it becomes diagnostic: early literacy isn’t treated as a triumph, it’s treated as a workflow disruption. The joke works because it drags a quiet institutional anxiety into daylight. Schools say they want prepared children; the system often wants children prepared in a very specific way, at a very specific pace, so the machinery of instruction can justify itself.

The undertaker image is doing double duty. It’s funny in the blunt, improper way King specialized in, but it also exposes a professional reflex: when the “client” arrives having already crossed the threshold, the expert’s status starts to wobble. Translate that to classrooms and you get the uncomfortable subtext: sometimes educators and administrators are incentivized to preserve the need for intervention. A child who can already read threatens the script of remediation, assessment, and measurable “growth” that schools are built to deliver and document.

King wrote as a contrarian with an allergy to pieties, and this line belongs to her broader skepticism about bureaucracies that claim moral purpose while protecting their own relevance. The cultural context matters: late-20th-century schooling debates were increasingly obsessed with standards, tracking, and professional credentialing. In that world, competence that arrives from outside the institution (parents, libraries, sheer curiosity) can look less like success and more like cheating.

It’s not an attack on teachers so much as on systems that mistake dependency for proof of value. King’s bleak humor lets her say the quiet part: institutions don’t just educate; they also manage their own indispensability.