Education Quote by Charles Kuralt

Kuralt’s line lands like a gentle scold dressed up as nostalgia, the kind of moral common sense that sounds obvious until you notice how rarely we live it. He opens with an imagined future - “a really mature, grown-up, wise society” - and that phrasing is doing quiet violence. It flatters the audience’s self-image while implying we’re still adolescents, chasing status symbols and short-term wins instead of tending the institutions that actually make civic life possible.

The centerpiece metaphor is literal and spatial: put teachers “at the center of the community.” Kuralt isn’t just talking about pay scales; he’s talking about prestige, proximity, and power. Center means visibility. Center means decision-making. Center means the job isn’t treated as auxiliary to “the real economy” but as the engine that reproduces the public itself.

The subtext is a classic American contradiction: we worship the idea of education and individual uplift, then outsource the labor of it to underfunded schools and overextended people. His repetition - “we don’t honor them enough, we don’t pay them enough” - pairs symbolic respect with material reality, refusing the cheap compromise of praise without budgets. Coming from a journalist associated with storytelling about everyday America, it reads as a warning from the front porch: a community reveals its true values not in speeches about children, but in how it treats the adults entrusted with them.