Quotes About Education

To break boundaries interests me. With all the knowledge that is available now in the world, it should be accessible to everyone. You can get so much information on the Internet now, and yet there are so many places in the world where people just don't have the education.

I'd let those entering (grad) students in on my secret—higher education is all about perseverance. It has nothing to do with smarts or creativity or anything else. It's about cultivating the willingness and stamina for hoop jumping. Jump through the hoops, I'd say. Do it well. Do it relentlessly. And in a few years you can join the elite of the American education system secure in the knowledge that you too can endure with the best of them.

Suddenly one of the huge front doors swings open. A black teenager impeccably dressed in morning coat and bow tie emerges ... 'Good morning, I am Derrick Noble, president of the student body. Welcome to Central High School.

When she began graduate school, our people [blacks] couldn't attend classes with whites at the University of Arkansas. After much grumbling and dickering, white folks had begun to allow small departments to integrate, class by class.

She [Melba's mother] would tell us the story of the lone black man who was trying to integrate the law school. In the classroom, he was forced to sit confined by a white picket fence erected around his desk and chair.

Grandma entertained us with reading or checkers or chess so we wouldn't bother Mother as she studied for her night-school exams. She was determined to complete her master's degree.

Mother [Lois Marie Pattillo] began meeting with a few others from our community who were also determined to be admitted to the graduate school of education at the university.

My mother was one of the first few blacks to integrate the University of Arkansas, graduating in 1954.

You're judging her by her literacy," Tara says. "You're a literacist." "You've made that up.

My old school, St Stella's, only goes to Year Ten and most of my friends now go to Pius Senior College, but my mother wouldn't allow it because she says the girls there leave with limited options and she didn't bring me up to have limitations placed upon me. If you know my mother, you'll sense there's an irony there, based on the fact that she is the Queen of the Limitation Placers in my life.

You're judging her by her literacy,' Tara says. 'You're a literacist.

If the munchkin, whose face I used to wash, tries to explain to us what a sixty-niner is, I'm going to report myself to child protection.

My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education.

That books should provide for learning, but that they should also provide for enjoyment

if people are resistant to education and cling to their varying whims, they are likely to swarm around a charismatic figure and thereby risk letting democracy mutate into tyranny.

I am involved with 'Write Girl ' which is such a great organization, because they go into inner city schools and work with underprivileged girls to pair them up with other writers. And it gets them learning to express themselves and become familiar with their own voice. They have a 100% success ratio getting those girls into college.

One of the perils of a classical education, he often reflected, was a predilection for vocabulary of an obfuscating nature.

Reading is a mighty engine, beside which steam and electricity sink into insignificance.

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser in musty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.

Sheridan hit the nerve. In one of his lectures, in 1762, he wrote: "Pronunciation . . . is a sort of proof that a person has kept good company, and on that account is sought after by all, who wish to be considered as fashionable people or members of the beau monde." He took no prisoners. "All other dialects are sure marks, either of a provincial, rustic, pedantic or mechanic education; and therefore have some degree of disgrace annexed to them.

Queen Elizabeth I has a fair claim to be the best educated monarch ever to sit on the throne of England. Apart from her mastery of rhetoric — demonstrated at Tilbury — she spoke six languages and translated French and Latin texts.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn't achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who's reading aloud—it's the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.