Education Quote by Brad Garrett

Garrett’s line lands like a plainspoken scold, the kind that sounds obvious until you notice how rarely we act like it. By stacking “teachers and our cops and our firemen” in one breath, he’s making a deliberately American trio: the people who raise you, protect you, and pull you out of burning buildings. The “our” does quiet work, too. It’s possessive, communal, almost patriotic, implying these aren’t abstract public employees but neighbors we lean on and then forget when budgets get tight.

The intent is moral triage. “Top of our list” borrows the language of household priorities - groceries, rent, kids - and smuggles civic policy into the intimate space of personal obligation. Garrett isn’t offering a policy memo; he’s offering an indictment that fits on a bumper sticker. That’s why it travels: it turns structural neglect into a character test.

Subtext: we celebrate service rhetorically while punishing it materially. Teachers get applause and underfunded classrooms; first responders get “hero” talk and strained staffing, political crossfire, and burnout. By pairing teachers with police and firefighters, he’s also trying to build a coalition across a cultural fault line: education often coded as “soft” public spending, policing as “hard” public order, firefighters as near-universal goodwill. The move suggests a longing for a consensus era where supporting these roles didn’t automatically signal your team.

Context matters: coming from an actor, the appeal isn’t technocratic credibility but cultural amplification. It’s the celebrity megaphone aimed at a familiar American contradiction - reverence without investment - and the frustration of watching communities rely on people they refuse to properly value.