Fatherhood Quote by Miroslav Vitous

Vitous is railing against a familiar modern humiliation: expertise getting priced out by entitlement. The line lands because it is not abstract outrage; it is the sound of someone who has done the work trying to hand over hard-won musical knowledge, only to be shoved down the hierarchy by money and admin logic. “Treated worse than a student coming off the street” isn’t snobbery so much as a protest against a collapsed standard. In his world, seriousness is earned in rehearsal rooms, on bandstands, in the bruising repetition that turns taste into craft. Tuition doesn’t buy that.

The subtext is about institutions laundering culture into “product.” The moment a school starts behaving like a business, the teacher’s authority becomes customer service, and the student becomes a paying client who can’t really fail. Vitous’s rhetorical pivot from pained (“really so upsetting”) to comic disbelief (“Come on. Give me a break”) is the tell: he’s not just angry, he’s stunned that anyone could confuse a conservatory with a checkout counter. “This is no school” reads like a jazz musician’s creed. A real school, in that tradition, is a place where you submit to the music, to standards, to critique. Remove that friction and you don’t get education; you get branding.

Calling it “a joke” is harsh, but strategically so. It’s the language of someone trying to shame a system back into seriousness. For a musician who came up in scenes where credibility is audible, the idea that respect is negotiable feels not merely insulting, but structurally corrupting.