Education Quote by William Glasser

Glasser is taking a swing at the most addictive drug in schooling: the feeling of being right. “Certainty” sounds like rigor, but he frames it as domination - a power structure that rewards rehearsed answers over lived thinking. The target isn’t knowledge itself; it’s the classroom culture where ambiguity is treated as failure and responsibility is outsourced to authorities, rubrics, and standardized “correctness.” When certainty rules, students learn an emotional lesson: don’t risk being wrong, don’t ask the question that might expose you, don’t own your thinking. Avoidance becomes a rational survival strategy.

The line also carries a quiet indictment of adult comfort. Certainty isn’t just what students cling to; it’s what institutions sell. It makes teaching scalable, grading defensible, and outcomes easy to report. Glasser, associated with Choice Theory and a counseling-forward view of motivation, is pushing against coercive models where compliance masquerades as learning. “Intellectual challenge and responsibility” are paired because for him real challenge demands agency: you can’t wrestle with ideas if someone else is doing the wrestling for you.

The subtext is almost therapeutic: replace the safety of certainty with the sturdier skill of tolerating uncertainty. That’s not a call for relativism or “anything goes.” It’s a demand that education become less about insurance against mistakes and more about capacity-building: curiosity, self-evaluation, and the nerve to revise your beliefs in public. In an era of high-stakes testing (and today, algorithm-fed certainty online), Glasser’s warning reads less like pedagogy and more like civic maintenance.