"We really shouldn't be running education like a supermarket where you compare prices"
About this Quote
Williams’s line lands because it punctures a familiar reform-era fantasy: that schooling can be made fairer and better by turning parents into shoppers and institutions into competing brands. “Supermarket” is doing heavy rhetorical work. It’s not just a diss; it conjures fluorescent aisles, bargain bins, and the idea that value is legible on a sticker. Education, she implies, is the opposite of a commodity: its outcomes are long-term, unevenly distributed, and deeply shaped by things a price tag can’t capture - peer effects, stability, specialist support, civic mission.
The “we really shouldn’t” is classic Williams: firm, slightly exasperated, a warning rather than a rallying cry. The subtext is that market language smuggles in a moral downgrade. Once you frame schools as products, you quietly reframe students as consumers (or liabilities), and the public good as a private purchase. Choice starts to sound empowering, but it often sorts families by information, time, and mobility - advantages that map neatly onto class. The supermarket analogy hints at that: the people who “compare prices” best aren’t the most deserving; they’re the most resourced.
Contextually, Williams spoke from the thick of late-20th-century British debates over league tables, parental choice, and quasi-markets in public services. Her target isn’t accountability per se; it’s the reduction of education to transactional competition, where the metric becomes the mission. The line works because it calls out the category error with one ordinary image - and makes the policy feel a little tacky.
The “we really shouldn’t” is classic Williams: firm, slightly exasperated, a warning rather than a rallying cry. The subtext is that market language smuggles in a moral downgrade. Once you frame schools as products, you quietly reframe students as consumers (or liabilities), and the public good as a private purchase. Choice starts to sound empowering, but it often sorts families by information, time, and mobility - advantages that map neatly onto class. The supermarket analogy hints at that: the people who “compare prices” best aren’t the most deserving; they’re the most resourced.
Contextually, Williams spoke from the thick of late-20th-century British debates over league tables, parental choice, and quasi-markets in public services. Her target isn’t accountability per se; it’s the reduction of education to transactional competition, where the metric becomes the mission. The line works because it calls out the category error with one ordinary image - and makes the policy feel a little tacky.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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