CeleryKills

I live under tall firs and a low cloud ceiling that makes you honest about what matters. When I told a younger organizer your line, “if you are still young… do!”, I recognized the current moving beneath it: a misquoted Shaw turned back toward the revolution he actually staged on the page. The famous jab, “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches,” is routinely misquoted (“Those who cannot do, teach”) and tossed like a wet rag at teachers, then wrung out for cheap laughs. But the line isn’t a sneer that ends the conversation. It’s a spark inside a longer, sharper argument about how change reproduces itself when the frontliners can no longer be on the line (Shaw, Man and Superman, “Maxims for Revolutionists,” 1903).

First, let’s place the quotation where Shaw put it. It appears in the Maxims for Revolutionists, an appendix to Man and Superman, not as a standalone epigram on bumper stickers, but as one filament in a web of aphorisms aimed at overturning lazy thinking about politics, education, and authority. In the original collection, Shaw fires off paradoxes about democracy, idolatry, and power to puncture our habit of worshiping titles and offices. He wasn’t writing a teaching-evaluation meme; he was road‑testing provocations for would‑be reformers (Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903; Project Gutenberg ed.).

What’s Man and Superman about, and why should a party reformer care? Shaw remixes the Don Juan myth into a modern debate about creative evolution and social responsibility. John Tanner, Shaw’s motor‑mouthed radical, is the author of The Revolutionist’s Handbook, a tract tucked into the play that argues revolutions are made by those who grasp how systems breed conformity, and then choose to act anyway. The plot winds through guardianship, marriage, and a dream‑debate in Hell, but the throughline is blunt: ideas without transmission stall; transmission without action dies in the cradle (Shaw, Man and Superman, 1903; see summaries in LitCharts and Encyclopedia.com).

The notorious proverb lands differently when you read it in that ecosystem. “He who can, does” is the front rank. “He who cannot, teaches” is not insult number two so much as rank number two. Shaw’s revolution is a relay, not a monoculture. The person who can no longer push the barricade has a second duty: to equip the next hands with tools and a working schematic. That’s how the movement survives its own fatigue. If you wrench the maxim out of Man and Superman you miss that it sits beside other barbs about government, democracy, and the need to strip idolatry from politics so the work can continue when the idol cracks (Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903; see also Phrasefinder note on the line’s origin in Man and Superman).

So where did the teacher‑bashing myth come from? Truncation and repetition. The line has been quoted without the surrounding apparatus for more than a century; anthologies often present it baldly, without the stage scaffolding that marks it as a provocation voiced inside an explicitly revolutionary handbook. It enters the culture as a free‑floating “truth,” and because it flatters the doer at the teacher’s expense, it travels fast. Dictionary and quotation sources typically trace it correctly to Man and Superman while noting the common misread that reduces it to a generic slur against educators (Oxford/Encyclopedia.com; QuoteCatalog).

But Shaw wasn’t naïve about education. He spends those Maxims detonating idols precisely because instruction, when it ossifies, can become a ceremony that acquaints people with obedience rather than with freedom. His cure is not to abolish teachers; it is to abolish idolatry and pedantry so that teaching becomes the deliberate replication of courage, skill, and skeptical intelligence. In other words, teaching is what the veteran revolutionary does in order that the revolution not age out (Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903; Archive.org ed. of Revolutionist’s Handbook).

That’s why your line about being old and teaching hits home. I’m not done doing, but my lungs aren’t what they were on those long nights leafleting ferry docks; I feel my role shifting. In Shaw’s architecture, the older fighter moves into the workshop. You take the young into the wiring closet of power and show them which junctions are mislabeled and which breakers trip the lights. Teaching in that sense is not a consolation prize. It’s continuity of operations.

We should also be honest about another reason the teacher‑sneer persists: defanging a radical playwright by turning one of his maxims into a cartoon blunts the political edge of the whole project. If you can discredit teachers as the “can’t” crowd, you weaken the reputational backbone of civic education, which is the one apparatus that can show people how corporate capture happens at committee level and how to interrupt it with staffing, budget riders, and primary challenges. That ridicule helps consolidate the very idolatry Shaw warned against, where “the democracy” becomes a congregation that worships “national idols” instead of learning how to replace them (Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903).

Now what does this mean for a young politico deciding whether to jump parties or reform one from within? Shaw’s play sets a trap for the romantic who thinks talk is enough and for the cynic who thinks only muscle counts. Man and Superman insists on a two‑stroke engine: disruption and instruction. Tanner’s speeches matter, but the plot exposes how ideas have to be embodied, transmitted, and iterated or they dissolve into salon talk. If your party is drifting into corporate pockets, the short answer is to do while you can and to teach while you must. That looks like recruiting and training local treasurers who can read compliance reports, building slates that refuse conflicted money, and making hard calls about candidates who cross moral lines. It also looks like leaving breadcrumbs: documented processes, recorded trainings, and public handbooks so that no one has to reinvent the fuse diagram the next cycle (see the play’s emphasis on the “Revolutionist’s Handbook” as an artifact meant to outlive the speechmaker; Shaw, 1903; summaries in SuperSummary and eNotes).

Here in the Northwest, we are wary of slogans that burn bright and then sputter in the rain. The durable flame is calmer and closer to the workbench. If I’ve got any equity left with younger organizers, I’ll spend it telling the truth: a movement that cannot teach itself how to replace its own parts will be bought for scrap. And a movement that teaches without fielding will become a book club with a very stern reading list.

So ask yourself: if you’re still young, which concrete act will you take in the next thirty days that the rest of us will be obliged to keep up with? And if you’re seasoned and your knees have started to file grievances, which three skills will you transfer before the next filing deadline closes?

References

• Shaw, George Bernard. Man and Superman, “Maxims for Revolutionists” (1903). Public domain editions via Wikisource and Project Gutenberg.
• “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches” origin note, The Phrase Finder (retrieved 2026).
• Man and Superman study resources and synopses: LitCharts guide (retrieved 2026) and Encyclopedia.com entry (retrieved 2026).
• Archived Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion (1903) for context on Shaw’s revolutionary framework.
• Quotation attribution note and common misattribution discussion. QuoteCatalog https://quotecatalog.com/quote/george-bernard-shaw-he-who-can-doe-MpxJMz1/.