"The very effect of the education they were given... was to make men think; and, thinking, they became less and less satisfied with the miserable pays they received"
About this Quote
Education, in Grierson's framing, isn’t a ladder out of poverty so much as a fuse thrown into the workplace. The line pivots on a quiet provocation: the system funds (or permits) just enough schooling to produce competent workers, then acts shocked when those workers start asking what competence is worth. That ellipsis does real work, hinting at a longer argument about cause and effect - not “education makes you better,” but “education makes you harder to manage.”
Grierson’s background as a pioneering documentarian matters here. His films and writing often treated public information as a civic technology: show people their own conditions clearly enough and they’ll start reinterpreting them. In that sense, “to make men think” is both a compliment and a warning. Thinking is presented as an emancipatory act, but also as a destabilizing one for employers and institutions that rely on resignation. The phrase “less and less satisfied” captures consciousness as a gradual ratchet, not a sudden awakening: once comparison and calculation enter the room, “miserable pays” stops feeling like fate and starts looking like policy.
The subtext is labor politics without the slogan. Grierson implies that low wages survive partly by keeping workers atomized, busy, and under-informed. Education interrupts that spell by teaching people to connect personal grievance to structural arrangement. It’s a neat inversion of the usual civic bromide: schooling doesn’t just produce good citizens; it produces impatient ones, citizens who notice the gap between what they’re told to deserve and what they’re actually paid.
Grierson’s background as a pioneering documentarian matters here. His films and writing often treated public information as a civic technology: show people their own conditions clearly enough and they’ll start reinterpreting them. In that sense, “to make men think” is both a compliment and a warning. Thinking is presented as an emancipatory act, but also as a destabilizing one for employers and institutions that rely on resignation. The phrase “less and less satisfied” captures consciousness as a gradual ratchet, not a sudden awakening: once comparison and calculation enter the room, “miserable pays” stops feeling like fate and starts looking like policy.
The subtext is labor politics without the slogan. Grierson implies that low wages survive partly by keeping workers atomized, busy, and under-informed. Education interrupts that spell by teaching people to connect personal grievance to structural arrangement. It’s a neat inversion of the usual civic bromide: schooling doesn’t just produce good citizens; it produces impatient ones, citizens who notice the gap between what they’re told to deserve and what they’re actually paid.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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