Education Quote by Susanna Moodie

Moodie’s line lands like a polite indictment: class division isn’t natural law, it’s a manufactured outcome of what people are taught to know and how they’re taught to behave. The phrasing is doing double work. “Want” doesn’t just mean absence; it signals deprivation, a lack produced by conditions, not personal failure. And by calling education and “moral training” the only “real barrier,” she strips away the usual Victorian alibis for hierarchy - bloodlines, breeding, taste - and relocates the problem in institutions and upbringing.

The subtext is reformist, but not radically egalitarian. “Moral training” carries the era’s loaded assumption that the poor require not only schooling but shaping: discipline, sobriety, industriousness, the etiquette of respectability. Moodie offers a bridge between classes that looks suspiciously like the working class learning the codes of the middle class. It’s empathy with a governing impulse.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in a nineteenth-century world obsessed with improvement, Moodie (a British-born author who chronicled settler life in Canada) understood how class identity could be both portable and fragile. In the colonies, old social markers blurred; competence and character often mattered more than pedigree, at least in theory. Her claim captures that frontier tension: the possibility of social mobility haunted by the conviction that people must be “trained” into it.

Why it works is its rhetorical neatness. She reduces a sprawling, violent system to two solvable inputs, making inequality feel less inevitable and more like a policy choice - while quietly smuggling in a moral hierarchy about who gets to define “training” in the first place.