Quotes About Reform

A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced.

what is needed in Russia is moral reform, and until that happens, Russia will not change.

Many schools are organized as they are because they always have been, not because they must be.

The changes that are needed in schools will take root more readily if local and national policies actually support them.

education doesn't need to be reformed—it needs to be transformed.

The problem is that too often, and in too many ways, current systems of mass education are a catastrophe in themselves. Far from looking to the future, too often they are facing stubbornly towards the past.

We're reducing the number of high-stakes tests from fifteen to five.

The mistake that many policymakers make is to believe that in education the best way to face the future is by improving what they did in the past. There are three major processes in education: the curriculum, which is what the school system expects students to learn; pedagogy, the process by which the system helps students to do it; and assessment, the process of judging how well they are doing.

To meet them, we need a radical change in how we think about and do school—a shift from the old industrial model to one based on entirely different principles and practices. People do not come in standard sizes or shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. Understanding this basic truth is the key to seeing how the system is failing—and also how it can be transformed. To do that we have to change the story: we need a better metaphor.

I feel that education needs an overhaul - courses are obsolete and grades are on the way out.

We will reform Social Security and Medicare, sparing our children from struggles we have the power to prevent.

Les réformes qui tiennent compte de l'expérience passée sont en général moins coûteuses et en outre elles sont durables, car elles retournent vers les voies simples et plus éprouvées de jadis et ne font qu'un usage très modéré des journaux, de la radio, de la télévision et de toutes les innovations faites soi-disant pour gagner du temps. (p. 377)

It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better.

Had Luther and Calvin been confined before they had begun to dogmatize, the states would have been spared many troubles.

Most learning problems exist not within the child but in the inadequacy of the system to find a way to teach them.

You'd have to suit me first...and you do not. You must reform your ways, and you have not, and you must know me first, and you will not, and you must believe in love, and you cannot.

The fall of one regime does not bring in a utopia. Rather, it opens the way for hard work and long efforts to build more just social, economic,and political relationships and the eradication of other forms of injustices and oppression.

The error of a lively rake lies in his passions, and may be reformed: but the dry rogue, who sets up for judgment, is incorrigible.

Revolutionary movements attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.

All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.

The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.

We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists.

First, take the government of the Indians out of politics second, let the laws of the Indians be the same as those of the whites third, give the Indian the ballot.

Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass