Education Quote by Twyla Tharp

There’s a quiet provocation in Tharp’s plainspoken dismissal of “formal education”: it’s not anti-intellectual, it’s anti-mismatch. “Made little sense to me” doesn’t mean she couldn’t learn; it means the institution’s way of packaging knowledge didn’t translate into her native language, which is movement, pattern, repetition, and physical consequence. Tharp isn’t romanticizing instinct. She’s flagging a structural problem: schools often treat understanding as something you prove with words, while dancers live in a medium where comprehension shows up as timing, alignment, and risk managed in real time.

The line also works as a sly origin story without the usual mythmaking. She doesn’t claim she was “too creative” for the classroom; she suggests the classroom was too narrow to recognize certain kinds of intelligence. That restraint matters. It turns a personal complaint into a critique of credential culture: the assumption that legitimate knowledge arrives stamped, sequenced, and assessed, rather than practiced, revised, and embodied.

Context sharpens it. Tharp came of age when dance was modernizing fast, when choreographers were building new grammars outside conservative gatekeeping. In that world, formal training could be both essential and suffocating: technique as toolkit, academia as script. Her sentence keeps the door open to learning while rejecting the idea that learning must look scholastic to be real. The subtext is a dare: if your education doesn’t make sense, the problem might not be you.