This Side of Paradise Education Quotes

Monsignor Darcy thinks that Amory is a special boy. But he also thinks that Amory can only flourish if someone like Darcy takes the boy under his wing. A school or college will try to make Amory conform to normal ideas of genius, and Darcy thinks this will crush Amory's spirit (which it kind of does).

Fitzgerald's narrator doesn't pull any punches when he gives his opinion of American prep schools. In his mind, they serve no real purpose other than to remind rich kids that they're rich.

One of Amory's favorite activities as a young man is to think about his colleagues' futures. He seems especially good at predicting how they'll fare in school and what they'll end up doing afterward.

Amory goes on predicting his friends' academic careers. This kind of speculation helps show just how confident Amory is in his knowledge of other people. But this is a confidence he loses as he gets older and more educated.

World War I breaks out in Europe in Amory's second year of school. But it doesn't affect him until his final year because the U.S. doesn't get involved right away. Once he's drafted, though, Amory ends his education and begins a whole new kind of education on the battlefield.

Burne Holiday is a real rebel. He actually thinks that purpose of Princeton is to educate people instead of offering them a bunch of exclusive clubs to belong to. The nerve! Who wants knowledge when you can have status instead?!

Amory's cousin Clara got married very young and didn't have the opportunity to continue her education as a result. This was one of the unfortunate consequences of marriage for women back in Fitzgerald's time. Once you were married, the world expected you to quit school and raise your kiddos.

Amory is sick of all the boring stuff he's been learning in his university classes. When the war in Europe breaks out, he's convinced that humanity hasn't learned from its past and never will. So he writes a poem about the failures of the adult generation and hands it to his professor.

Amory makes a cutting comment about Princeton when he says that he's managed to get a good education in spite of going to college. In other words, college fills a person's head with all kinds of normal, conformist ideas. But education is all about training your mind to think for itself, and Amory thinks he's only been able to do this outside of school.

Amory wishes that the world were capable of thinking for itself. But unfortunately, people are still too immoral at heart to self-govern. In Amory's mind, this is why people still need religion and laws. They need some higher power to tell them what to do because they won't act morally on their own.