Education Quote by Peter Brimelow

The line lands like a casual, common-sense question, but it’s really a provocation aimed at an institution: public education as a closed shop. By choosing “waiters” as the comparison point, Brimelow reaches for an immigrant-and-upward-mobility archetype Americans instinctively root for. The waiter who becomes an owner is capitalism’s favorite morality play: grit, apprenticeship, risk, reward. Slide that story onto teaching, and the current system starts to look less like a civic project and more like an industry with rigged ladders.

The intent is to reframe teachers not as salaried caretakers inside a bureaucracy, but as potential proprietors with skin in the game. “Owning schools” isn’t just about equity stakes; it’s shorthand for autonomy, authority, and control over the product. It smuggles in a market-friendly critique: if educators can’t “move up” to ownership, something - unions, certification regimes, district governance, capital constraints - must be blocking merit-based entrepreneurship.

The subtext is also a dig at professionalization. Restaurants are regulated, but the barrier to ownership is portrayed as effort and savvy, not gatekeeping. Schools, by contrast, are implied to be credential-locked and politically managed, where even competent insiders can’t convert expertise into institutional power.

Context matters: a late-20th-century, reform-era impatience with bureaucracies, when “choice,” charters, and privatization were pitched as liberation narratives. The question’s rhetorical trick is that it sounds pro-teacher while quietly attacking the system that employs them - and suggesting that real respect would look less like pay raises and more like converting educators into entrepreneurs.