Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.
Interpretation
Education can change a person's qualifications and desires, but it can also create barriers to certain jobs.
In this quote, Terry Pratchett humorously compares education to a communicable disease, suggesting that while it equips individuals with knowledge and the desire to share it, it can also limit their opportunities in the job market. This reflects the notion that education can both empower and restrict a person's choices in life, posing a critique on how varying job markets value formal education.
In practice
In a seminar on the value of education, you could use this quote to spark discussion about job market realities.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.
Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts itself off from its youth severs its lifeline; it is condemned to bleed to death.
'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings.
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.
Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.
One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.
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