"The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools"
About this Quote
Quindlen’s line lands because it weaponizes a familiar American ritual: the high school reunion, where the myth of teenage hierarchy gets audited by adult reality. “Prom court” isn’t just a jab at adolescent popularity; it’s a shorthand for an entire value system that treats visibility as virtue and charisma as destiny. By pairing it with “brains,” she doesn’t romanticize intelligence so much as insist on a blunt economic truth: adulthood rewards competence, not crowns. The reunion punchline supplies the proof the reader already suspects, turning the quote into an argument that feels like common sense with teeth.
The subtext is sharper: we know this, and yet we keep pretending we don’t. Quindlen points the finger not at kids for buying the story, but at the culture and schools for selling it. That “you’d never know it” twist exposes an institutional doublethink. Education is supposed to be the pipeline from ability to opportunity, yet it often mirrors the same status games it claims to transcend: sports pep rallies, social capital, the quiet privileging of the likable over the brilliant, the camera-ready over the curious.
Context matters. Quindlen, writing as a journalist steeped in late-20th-century media critique, is diagnosing a society that increasingly trains young people to perform themselves. Her complaint isn’t nostalgia for nerds; it’s a warning about misaligned incentives. When schools echo culture’s popularity economy, they don’t just misread the future - they help sabotage it.
The subtext is sharper: we know this, and yet we keep pretending we don’t. Quindlen points the finger not at kids for buying the story, but at the culture and schools for selling it. That “you’d never know it” twist exposes an institutional doublethink. Education is supposed to be the pipeline from ability to opportunity, yet it often mirrors the same status games it claims to transcend: sports pep rallies, social capital, the quiet privileging of the likable over the brilliant, the camera-ready over the curious.
Context matters. Quindlen, writing as a journalist steeped in late-20th-century media critique, is diagnosing a society that increasingly trains young people to perform themselves. Her complaint isn’t nostalgia for nerds; it’s a warning about misaligned incentives. When schools echo culture’s popularity economy, they don’t just misread the future - they help sabotage it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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