Education Quote by Thomas Sowell

Sowell’s jab lands because it yanks the halo off a word that usually ends arguments: education. By putting it in scare quotes, he signals that he’s not attacking learning so much as a credentialing culture that confuses enclosure with enlightenment. “Too much” is doing careful work here: it’s not anti-school; it’s anti-the-way-school-often-functions. The insult isn’t that education is useless, but that it can be perversely effective at producing people fluent in abstractions and insulated from the consequences those abstractions can cause.

“Expensive isolation from reality” is a deliberately double-edged phrase. Expensive: tuition, yes, but also the opportunity cost of years spent in an environment that rewards impressive answers over accurate ones. Isolation: not just physical separation on campuses, but social and epistemic separation - a training in status signals, jargon, and moral certainty that can substitute for contact with markets, institutions, and everyday constraints. “Reality” is the punchline: it’s the unruly world of tradeoffs, incentives, and unintended consequences that Sowell’s economics insists you can’t graduate past.

The subtext is a broader conservative critique of elite formation. Sowell is warning that higher education can function less like a ladder of mobility and more like a greenhouse: it grows ideas under controlled conditions, then releases them into the weather where they fail - except the people who held them aren’t the ones paying the price. Coming from an economist known for emphasizing empirical skepticism and the limits of centralized expertise, the line is also a preemptive strike at technocratic confidence: the more prestigious the “education,” the easier it is to mistake distance for depth.