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.
A child reminds us that playtime is an essential part of our daily routine.
When you have teachers saying, 'I don't have enough time for hands-on activities,' we need to rethink the way we do education.
She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.
The biggest mistake in student films is that they are usually cast so badly, with friends and people the directors know. Actually you can cover a lot of bad direction with good acting
Education fails unless the Three R's at one end of the school spectrum lead ultimately to the Four P's at the other-Preparati on for Earning, Preparation for Living, Preparation for Understanding, Preparation for Participation in the problems involved in the making of a better world.
If you educate a boy, you educate a person, but if you educate a girl, you educate a family and benefit an entire community.β An entire community - now that is really interesting! Then I found the quote changed a little more on the Kingdom of Jordan website by her Royal Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan during her interview with Oprah Winfrey. Queen Rania relates the quote in these words: βAs you educate a woman, you educate the family. If you educate the girls, you educate the future.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.