Time & Perspective Quote by Anne Sullivan

Tragedy is a startling word to hear from an educator, a profession usually coded as patient, incremental, hopeful. Anne Sullivan uses it like a fire alarm: not to predict fate, but to indict a system that has mistaken schooling for education. The line’s force comes from its two pivots - “immediate future” and “vast educational resources.” She’s not talking about some distant moral decline; she’s warning that the harm is already queued up, waiting for society to keep doing what it’s doing. And she’s not pleading scarcity. America, she implies, has the money, the institutions, the manpower. What’s missing is purpose.

Her phrasing carries a quiet, radical accusation: resources are already “serving” something, just not “truth and justice.” That subtext lands like a critique of education as social sorting, patriotic mythmaking, or industrial workforce preparation - a system that can be lavishly funded and still morally bankrupt. Sullivan’s own life sharpens the context. Best known for teaching Helen Keller, she understood education as liberation from isolation, not mere credentialing. Her success depended on imagination, persistence, and an ethical commitment to the student’s full humanity - values that don’t scale automatically just because a nation builds more schools.

The sentence is also a rebuke to complacent reform talk. “True purpose” suggests education has been captured by secondary goals and needs to be reclaimed. Sullivan isn’t romanticizing truth and justice as slogans; she’s treating them as operating principles. Without them, she implies, even the most advanced educational machinery will efficiently produce an unjust society - and call it progress.