Quotes About Education

Evil is relatively rare; ignorance is epidemic.

And this, this, is their genius. Conservatives are not looking to make education more rigorous and informative, or science more empirical or verifiable, or voting more representative, or the government more efficient or effective. They just want all those things to reinforce their partisan, ideological, conservative viewpoint.

To have a viable civilization, people have to have a benign government, a semblance of education, spare time, imagination, and manners

Don't you know what a pussy is, sir?' 'Of course he doesn't. He hasn't even seen Basic Instinct.

One of these grand defects, as I humbly conceive, is this, that children are habituated to learning without understanding.

But what do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary of academe for the boorish badlands of real life?

If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.

Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.

Of] particular importance is the relationship between education and the political process.

A caste society," wrote U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel 25 years ago, "violates the style of American democracy.… The nation in effect does not have a truly public school system in a large part of its communities; it has permitted what is in effect a private school system to develop under public auspices.… Equality of educational opportunity throughout the nation continues today for many to be more a myth than a reality.

Turning in his seat, he gestures at the street and shrugs. "If you don't, as an American, begin to give these kids the kind of education that you give the kids of Donald Trump, you're asking for disaster.

One would not have thought that children in America would ever have to choose between a teacher or a playground or sufficient toilet paper. Like grain in a time of famine, the immense resources which the nation does in fact possess go not to the child in the greatest need but to the child of the highest bidder—the child of parents who, more frequently than not, have also enjoyed the same abundance when they were schoolchildren.

Equal funding is opposed for opposite reasons: either because it won't improve or benefit the poorer schools—not "necessarily," the governor's assistant says—or because it would improve and benefit those schools but would be subtracting something from the other districts, and the other districts view this as unjust.

the willingness to relegate a person in my father's situation to a lower and less vigilant degree of medical attention was an accurate reflection of the values of a social system which, as I had learned in my own work in education, measures human life, more frequently than not, in rather hard-nosed and explicit terms of future payoff to the national well-being.

The New Jersey constitution, says the court in its decision, requires that all students be provided with "an opportunity to compete fairly for a place in our society.… Pole vaulters using bamboo poles even with the greatest effort cannot compete with pole vaulters using aluminum poles.

The struggle being waged today, where there is any struggle being waged at all, is closer to the one that was addressed in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court accepted segregated institutions for black people, stipulating only that they must be equal to those open to white people. The dual society, at least in public education, seems in general to be unquestioned.

We are preparing a generation of robots. Kids are learning exclusively through rote. We have children who are given no conceptual framework. They do not learn to think, because their teachers are straitjacketed by tests that measure only isolated skills. As a result, they can be given no electives, nothing wonderful or fanciful or beautiful, nothing that touches the spirit or the soul.

One hundred years before the present government existed, a powerful leader, Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, stated his views in clear, unflinching terms. I thank God, he said, that there are no free schools nor printing [in this land]. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing hath divulged them...God save us from both!

When a school board hires just one woman to retrieve 400 missing children from the streets of the North Bronx, we may reasonably conclude that it does not particularly desire to find them. If 100 of these children startled us by showing up at school, moreover, there would be no room for them in P.S. 94. The building couldn't hold them.

A polarization of this issue, whereby some insist upon the primacy of school, others upon the primacy of family and neighborhood, obscures the fact that both are elemental forces in the lives of children. The family, however, differs from the school in the significant respect that government is not responsible, or at least not directly, for the inequalities of family background. It is responsible for inequalities in public education.

Phone calls aired on several radio stations voice a raw contempt for the capacities of urban children ("money will not help these children") but predict the imminent demise of education in the richer districts if their funding is cut back. Money, the message seems to be, is crucial to rich districts but will be of little difference to the poor.

The alphabet Miss Poobner taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters--Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on--and something insipid about the parade of grinning letters defeated Dylan's will utterly.

I know a lot about birds and bees, but I don't know very much about the birds and the bees. Everything I do know I had to teach myself on the Internet, because I don't have anyone to ask. For example, I know that you give someone a blowjob by putting your penis in their mouth.

According to Project Drawdown, four of the most effective strategies for mitigating global warming are reducing food waste, educating girls, providing family planning and reproductive healthcare, and collectively shifting to a plant-rich diet. The benefits of these advancements extend far beyond the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and their primary cost is our collective effort.