"The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called "life", expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing"
About this Quote
The sting lands in the line “by his standards.” Dijkstra isn’t claiming the student learns nothing in an absolute sense; he’s saying the student’s metric of learning is so impoverished that genuine intellectual growth won’t register. If you arrive expecting a syllabus of routines, you’ll miss the point of the discipline, especially in computing, where the surface layer (languages, tools, “best practices”) churns quickly and the underlying ideas (abstraction, correctness, reasoning about programs) are the durable part. His subtext is elitist only in the way that insisting on standards is elitist: he’s defending depth against credentialism.
Context matters: Dijkstra spent a career pushing against the industrial drift of computer science, wary of turning a young field into factory work with a veneer of mathematics. The “circus called life” isn’t just bleak; it’s strategic. He’s implying that the world already pressures you to perform. Education, if it’s worth anything, should be the one place that teaches you to think rather than to be trained.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Dijkstra, Edsger. (2026, January 15). The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called "life", expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-students-that-like-the-wild-animal-being-59657/
Chicago Style
Dijkstra, Edsger. "The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called "life", expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-students-that-like-the-wild-animal-being-59657/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called "life", expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-students-that-like-the-wild-animal-being-59657/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
