Education Quote by Gertrude Stein

A Stein line like this lands as a shrug with a razor hidden inside it. "Very likely" performs politeness while quietly detonating a civic religion: the idea that schooling reliably produces better people, better art, better politics. She doesn’t argue; she undercuts. The sentence is built on softeners ("very likely", "very much") that make the claim harder to fight because it refuses the swagger of certainty. It’s not a manifesto. It’s an eyebrow.

Stein’s intent is less anti-intellectual than anti-credential. Coming out of a modernist moment obsessed with breaking inherited forms, she’s skeptical of any institution that promises refinement on schedule. Education, in the formal, standardized sense, can look like a factory for consensus: it teaches the same references, the same "proper" taste, the same approved ways of thinking. For a writer who made a career out of making language strange again, that kind of training risks smoothing the mind into predictability.

The subtext is also class-aware and American. Education is sold as meritocracy’s main elevator; Stein hints it may be more like interior decoration for the already comfortable. If education doesn’t "make very much difference", what does? Temperament. Attention. An appetite for experiment. The accidents of money, time, and freedom to be odd without punishment.

Context matters: Stein was highly educated herself, yet she became famous by violating what education typically rewards (clarity, coherence, deference to tradition). The line reads like a self-diagnosis and a provocation: stop worshipping the institution and start noticing what it fails to touch.