Wit & Attitude Quote by Bertolt Brecht

Knowledge stops being a cathedral and turns into a construction site the moment the teacher is forced back into apprenticeship. Brecht, the Marxist playwright-poet who made a career out of breaking the spell of authority, is needling the most comfortable fiction of education: that expertise is a stable possession rather than a temporary role. The “crazy turn” isn’t chaos for its own sake; it’s the destabilization Brecht prized, the same estrangement effect he used onstage to make audiences see the machinery behind the story. Here the machinery is pedagogy itself.

The line carries a quiet accusation. When teachers are “taught to learn,” the hierarchy that keeps classrooms (and societies) tidy starts to wobble. The teacher’s status depends on performing certainty; learning, by contrast, requires admitting not-knowing. Brecht’s subtext is political: a system that trains teachers only to transmit sanctioned knowledge is a system that fears revision, contradiction, and the student who asks the wrong-but-necessary question. Retraining teachers to learn is a way of rerouting power, from doctrine to inquiry.

Context matters: Brecht wrote in an era when schooling was openly enlisted by states and parties to manufacture obedience, whether under fascism, Stalinism, or the “respectable” bureaucracies in between. So his provocation lands as civic strategy, not feel-good professional development. If teachers model learning, they model dissent; they turn the classroom into a rehearsal space for critical consciousness. That’s the “crazy” part: education becomes less about order and more about motion, where authority is earned by curiosity rather than enforced by position.