Education Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs drops this line like a needle in a vein: education isn’t a warehouse for “facts,” it’s a training ground for the invisible beliefs that decide what we do with them. Coming from a writer who spent his career anatomizing control systems - governments, drugs, language itself - the quote reads less like wholesome pedagogy and more like a warning label. Values are the operating system; facts are just data. Whoever installs the OS gets to shape the user.

The phrasing is deceptively clean. “Aim” implies intention and design, not accidental uplift. “Knowledge, not of facts” is a provocation in a culture that treats information as a moral good by itself. Burroughs doesn’t deny facts; he demotes them. Facts can be memorized, traded, tested. Values are stickier: they define what counts as a fact worth noticing, which authorities feel legitimate, which lives feel grievable, which futures feel possible.

Context matters. Burroughs wrote in the long shadow of propaganda, Cold War conformity, and institutional psychiatry - systems that didn’t just police behavior, they trained people to desire their own policing. In that light, “education” becomes a contested site: either it reproduces the dominant value-set (obedience, productivity, normalcy) or it equips students to see the strings.

The subtext is almost cynical: if education always transmits values, the honest question isn’t whether values belong in schools, but whose values are being smuggled in under the banner of “neutral” facts. Burroughs forces the uncomfortable recognition that neutrality is often just the house style of power.