Education Quote by Bobby Scott

“Perhaps” is doing a lot of political work here. Bobby Scott isn’t delivering a sweeping philosophical claim; he’s staking out a defensible hierarchy of government obligations in a country that can’t stop arguing about what government is for. By framing education as “perhaps the most important function,” he’s elevating schools above potholes and permitting offices without inviting the easy rebuttal that defense or public safety must come first. It’s a legislator’s precision: bold enough to signal priorities, hedged enough to survive a hearing.

The subtext is federalism with an agenda. By naming “state and local governments,” Scott nods to the American habit of treating education as community property, controlled through school boards, property taxes, and state standards. That acknowledgement functions as a bridge to his larger project: if education is primarily a state and local responsibility, it still demands national attention because local capacity is wildly uneven. The line quietly indicts the system where a child’s zip code predicts class size, counselors, and textbook quality.

Contextually, Scott’s career in education and labor policy sits inside recurring national flare-ups: fights over school funding, integration, special education, and, more recently, culture-war governance. In that landscape, calling education the top function isn’t sentimental. It’s a power claim about budgets and legitimacy: governments earn public trust less through speeches than through whether kids can read, graduate, and have real options afterward. Education becomes the state’s most intimate form of nation-building, carried out one classroom at a time.