Education Quote by Sly Stone

“Sunday school don’t make you cool forever” lands like a sly elbow to the ribs: it’s playful, plainspoken, and quietly ruthless. Sly Stone takes a sacred American institution - the weekly assembly line for good manners and good souls - and treats it like what it often becomes in public life: a resume line. The grammar matters. “Don’t” instead of “doesn’t” isn’t a mistake so much as a stance, a street-level refusal to dress the message up for polite company. Morality, he’s saying, isn’t a credential you earn once and spend for decades.

The intent reads as a warning against borrowed righteousness. Sunday school can give you language, community, maybe even genuine grounding. But “cool” is the tell: Sly isn’t talking about salvation, he’s talking about status. People use faith, upbringing, or youthful innocence as social proof - evidence they’re safe, good, above suspicion. He punctures that fantasy. Time erodes the shine of early training; character has to be renewed in the real world, under pressure, when it costs something.

In Sly’s cultural moment, that skepticism hits harder. The late-60s/early-70s promised liberation but also revealed hypocrisy everywhere: in politics, in race relations, in supposedly enlightened scenes that still ran on ego and exploitation. Funk, at its best, exposed the gap between what America preached and what it practiced. This line fits that tradition: don’t confuse instruction with transformation, or piety with integrity. If you want “cool” to last, it can’t be inherited - it has to be lived.