Quotes About Education

I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.

Being graded for memorizing male accomplishments with the deep message that we can learn what others do but never do it ourselves.

As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism.

Will we get to the point that learning sign language is a part of literacy? That knowing both an audible and a physical language is routine?

Never having seen women play chess, they assumed this game wasn't for them and without even a female teacher as role model, they dropped out.

Women of all groups were measurably more likely than their male counterparts to vote for equality, health, and education, and against violence as a way of solving conflict. It wasn't about biology, but experience.

As I write this, there are mainstream educators trying to discredit efforts to diversify the academic canon by giving them the dreaded label "politically correct"—now known familiarly on campus as "P.C." (which, as Robin Morgan has pointed out, might well stand for "Plain Courtesy")—as if centuries of exclusion had not been the height (or depth) of politics.

We learn where we know the least.

One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is "I don't know enough to be a feminist." Or even "I'm not smart enough to be a feminist." It breaks my heart.

In my own college life, I got through four years as a government major without learning that women were not just "given" the vote, that the real number of slave rebellions was suppressed because rebelling was contagious, or that the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy.

Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening

No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down with every year of higher education. We've been studying our own absence.

When people of color are in the majority instead of the minority, audiences are often the best education that white listeners can have.

When teachers of randomly selected students are told their students are slow, they become slower; when teachers believe their students are gifted, they become more gifted.

Since Native students often prosper in cooperative rather than competitive classrooms—as do a lot of female students, regardless of where they come from—I've been asked to talk about the feminist movement and efforts to change classrooms into learning circles.

What if heterosexual male teachers were prejudged as sexual abusers of children, in the way that gay males often have been (which would make more statistical sense, since heterosexual males are the majority of abusers of both girls and boys)?

Women still average much less in earnings over a lifetime than men do and have to pay back the same college debt.

In this way, Harvard Law School gives me a big gift: I worry less about hostile responses. Ultimately, they educate an audience. As the great Flo Kennedy will suggest later when we begin to speak together, "Just pause, let the audience absorb the hostility, then say, 'I didn't pay him to say that.'

I don't know enough to be a feminist." Or even "I'm not smart enough to be a feminist." It breaks my heart.

Now I see a few campuses that are honest

One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is "I don't know enough to be a feminist." Or even "I'm not smart enough to be a feminist." It breaks my heart.

Also, despite the belief of population experts that uneducated women wouldn't use birth control, these women knew very well when their own bodies were suffering from too many pregnancies and births. That's why as prime minister, Indira Gandhi took on the controversy of creating the first national family planning program. Her early journeys in those women-only cars had taught her that ordinary women would use it, even if in secret, and literacy had little to do with it.

Thinking about our schooling in different decades and parts of the country, all three of us in that kitchen discover that we were taught more about ancient Greece and Rome than about the history of the land we live on. We learned about the pyramid builders of Egypt but not the pyramid builders of the Mississippi River.

But controversy is a teacher. The