"The wrong things are predominantly stressed in the schools - things remote from the student's experience and need"
About this Quote
School, Sullivan suggests, isn’t merely inefficient; it’s mis-aimed. Her complaint isn’t that students fail to absorb information, but that institutions keep feeding them material that floats above their lived reality. “Predominantly stressed” is the tell: the problem is systemic, baked into priorities, curricula, and the quiet incentives that reward coverage over connection. The “wrong things” aren’t necessarily false. They’re just remote - knowledge treated as a performance rather than a tool.
Coming from Anne Sullivan, the famous teacher of Helen Keller, the line reads less like abstract pedagogy and more like battlefield reportage. Sullivan’s daily work depended on converting concepts into touch, experience, necessity. When your student can’t access the world in conventional ways, “remote” isn’t a metaphor; it’s an obstacle. Her success came from collapsing the distance between word and life until learning became urgent, even physical. That’s the subtext: education works when it binds intellect to need, not when it asks students to venerate detached facts.
The quote also quietly indicts a certain class bias in schooling. What counts as “important” knowledge often mirrors what administrators and textbook-makers consider respectable: canonical, standardized, easily tested. “Need,” meanwhile, is personal, local, sometimes messy - exactly what bureaucratic systems try to scrub out. Sullivan’s line still stings because it names the polite tragedy of school: students are blamed for disengaging from content that was never built to meet them where they are.
Coming from Anne Sullivan, the famous teacher of Helen Keller, the line reads less like abstract pedagogy and more like battlefield reportage. Sullivan’s daily work depended on converting concepts into touch, experience, necessity. When your student can’t access the world in conventional ways, “remote” isn’t a metaphor; it’s an obstacle. Her success came from collapsing the distance between word and life until learning became urgent, even physical. That’s the subtext: education works when it binds intellect to need, not when it asks students to venerate detached facts.
The quote also quietly indicts a certain class bias in schooling. What counts as “important” knowledge often mirrors what administrators and textbook-makers consider respectable: canonical, standardized, easily tested. “Need,” meanwhile, is personal, local, sometimes messy - exactly what bureaucratic systems try to scrub out. Sullivan’s line still stings because it names the polite tragedy of school: students are blamed for disengaging from content that was never built to meet them where they are.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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