George Carlin once said, “Don’t just teach your children to read… Teach them to question everything”?

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Comedian George Carlin once said, “Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.”

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Context

The alleged quote was a paraphrase of a longer segment from one of Carlin’s comedy specials. While the quote shared on social media wasn’t verbatim, its meaning and content remained more or less the same.

For years, social media users have shared a quote allegedly attributed to George Carlin, the American comedian who died in 2008. It read: “Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.”

For example, a Reddit post from May 2020 featuring the quote in the meme has received over 3,100 upvotes as of this writing. A similar post from 2022 received 1,900 upvotes.

The quote also appeared in numerous posts on other social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and X, and was attributed to Carlin on Goodreads.

This quote could be traced to Carlin. However, it paraphrases Carlin’s statement from a comedy special, rather than directly quoting him.

The earliest appearance of a verbatim quotation seems to be from Posts X by @TheGeorgeCarlin on April 2, 2013, five years after his death. According to the account bio, “This is the official Twitter for George Carlin, operated by Kelly Carlin and the Estate of George Carlin.” Kelly Carlin, writer and podcasteris the daughter of a deceased comedian.

However, the exact wording of this entry could not be found in any published writing or performance recording made before Carlin’s death in June 2008.

Instead, the evidence suggested that X’s 2013 post was a paraphrase of Carlin’s authentic statement, identified in the 2021 document. fasting on GeorgeCarlin.net. This website, according to its Frequently Asked Questions sidewas created “to address and correct the many, many pieces of writing on the internet that have been falsely attributed to George Carlin and continue to be falsely attributed to him today.” The site’s creator, who identified only as Bill, noted in the same FAQ section that he has no connection to the Carlin estate.

According to a post on GeorgeCarlin.net, the original source of the paraphrased quote was the HBO comedy series “It’s Bad for Ya” special which aired live in March 2008, just a few months before Carlin’s performance death. This special episode was also released as album this year.

In a special recording loaded on YouTube in 2022, Carlin reposted the entire quote, starting at timestamp 50:04.

The full quote that Carlin gave in the video was as follows:

(It’s) not important that children read. Children who want to read will read. Children who want to learn to read will learn to read. (It’s) much more important to teach children to question what they read. Children should be taught to question everything. To question everything they read, everything they hear.

Snopes reached out to the Carlin Estate for confirmation that X’s 2013 post was paraphrasing a longer statement the comedian made from a 2008 comedy special. This article will be updated if they respond.

However, given that the paraphrase of the quote was so close to the original, and its meaning and content remained more or less the same, we rated this statement as “Mostly true.”

This isn’t the first quote attributed to Carlin that Snopes has investigated. We previously looked at a claim the comedian once made: “Instead of giving kids trophies for participation, teach them activities where the reward is the outcome.”

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