Education Quote by Albert Shanker

Shanker’s line is a dare disguised as common sense: if you already fund a shared good, why should opting out buy you moral high ground? The private swimming pool is a deliberately suburban image, summoning a world where status comes with fences, memberships, and the quiet suggestion that public life is for other people. By pairing schooling with a pool, he strips private education of its usual halo (religion, rigor, “fit”) and recasts it as a luxury amenity - pleasant for the owner, corrosive for the commons.

The intent is political, not philosophical. Shanker spent his career defending public schools and teachers’ unions against a rising tide of privatization and “choice” rhetoric. In that fight, private education isn’t just a personal preference; it’s a structural threat. The subtext is about exit: when the people with the most time, money, and influence stop using public institutions, those institutions lose not only resources but legitimacy. A public school system can survive budget cuts; it struggles to survive abandonment by the constituency that could demand it be excellent.

The cleverness is in the moral inversion. Instead of treating private schooling as aspiration, Shanker frames it as antisocial consumption - a decision that signals distrust in collective provision. It’s also a challenge to the familiar argument that “I’m paying twice.” Shanker implies the second payment is the point: you’re not buying education so much as buying separation.