Wit & Attitude Quote by Stephen Vizinczey

Vizinczey’s line is a scalpel aimed at a comforting civic myth: that schooling is a moral upgrade. The opening feint, “Strange as it may seem,” mimics the polite throat-clearing of an enlightened lecturer, then pivots into a deliberately rude claim. “No amount of learning” isn’t anti-knowledge so much as anti-credentialism. He separates learning (accumulated information, technique, polish) from intelligence (judgment, humility, curiosity) and insists the first can coexist happily with the second’s absence.

The sting is in “cure.” Stupidity is framed like an illness we keep treating with the wrong medicine: more courses, more degrees, more “content.” That medical metaphor implies the real problem is diagnostic. Education can’t fix what it refuses to name: the habits of mind that resist evidence, fetishize certainty, and confuse fluency with understanding. Then comes the darker punchline: “formal education positively fortifies it.” Fortifies suggests a castle, defenses thickened by credentials, jargon, and institutional validation. A person who might once have been merely wrong becomes unbudgeable, armored by status and the social permission to speak confidently.

Contextually, this is a writer’s complaint about the professionalization of thought: literature, politics, and public debate dominated by people trained to perform expertise rather than risk insight. The subtext is not “don’t study,” but “don’t outsource thinking.” Formal education can sharpen tools; it can also teach you to mistake the tools for the work, and the certificate for the mind.