"There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison"
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Glasser’s line lands like a shiv because it reframes a supposedly neutral rule - time schedules - as a moral choice. “Only two places” is deliberate overreach: a provocation that dares you to name a third institution where the clock outranks the task and the person. By pairing “school” with “prison,” he collapses the comforting myth that schooling is purely developmental. The subtext is control: both systems are organized less around mastery than around compliance, throughput, and supervision.
The phrase “time takes precedence” is bureaucratic language, the kind used to justify bells, periods, lockstep curricula, and “seat time” requirements. Glasser yanks that language into the open and asks what it’s really doing: rationing attention, standardizing bodies, and teaching the habit of external authority. You don’t leave a class because you’ve learned; you leave because the bell says so. That’s not efficiency; it’s conditioning.
Context matters. Glasser, a psychologist known for reality therapy and choice theory, spent his career arguing that coercion corrodes motivation and that people learn best when they experience agency, relevance, and responsibility. His critique fits the late-20th-century churn of school reform, where “time on task” and pacing guides were sold as rigor. He flips the script: when time is the primary constraint, “the job to be done” stops meaning understanding or growth and starts meaning compliance with a schedule.
The sting is ethical, not metaphorical. If school resembles prison in its relationship to time, the question becomes unavoidable: are we educating people, or processing them?
The phrase “time takes precedence” is bureaucratic language, the kind used to justify bells, periods, lockstep curricula, and “seat time” requirements. Glasser yanks that language into the open and asks what it’s really doing: rationing attention, standardizing bodies, and teaching the habit of external authority. You don’t leave a class because you’ve learned; you leave because the bell says so. That’s not efficiency; it’s conditioning.
Context matters. Glasser, a psychologist known for reality therapy and choice theory, spent his career arguing that coercion corrodes motivation and that people learn best when they experience agency, relevance, and responsibility. His critique fits the late-20th-century churn of school reform, where “time on task” and pacing guides were sold as rigor. He flips the script: when time is the primary constraint, “the job to be done” stops meaning understanding or growth and starts meaning compliance with a schedule.
The sting is ethical, not metaphorical. If school resembles prison in its relationship to time, the question becomes unavoidable: are we educating people, or processing them?
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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