Education Quote by Munshi Premchand

A Premchand line like this lands as a quiet rebuke, the kind that sounds almost commonsensical until you notice who it’s aimed at: a society busy mistaking paperwork for wisdom. By splitting “education” from “literacy and degrees,” he isn’t being anti-school so much as anti-credentialism. Literacy is a tool; degrees are a receipt. Education, in his moral universe, is the thing that changes how you treat people when no one is watching.

The subtext is pointed if you place it in Premchand’s India, where colonial institutions produced a small class fluent in English, trained for offices, and often insulated from the rural hardship Premchand wrote about with such unsentimental clarity. A certificate could buy proximity to power without necessarily producing empathy, judgment, or civic spine. His fiction is crowded with characters who know the rules but not the cost: clerks, landlords, petty officials. The damage they do rarely comes from ignorance of letters; it comes from the absence of inner schooling.

The line also needles a modern anxiety: the idea that “success” is a straight pipeline from qualification to virtue. Premchand flips that pipeline. Real education is ethical and practical; it teaches discernment, solidarity, and the ability to see through the performance of respectability. In an era (and ours) where status can be printed on a page, he insists the harder credential is character.