Quotes About Education

When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should 'teach writing,' which I have no idea how to do and don't really believe in.

I continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published.

I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she'd written: 'This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!' That made a big impression on me.

Several elementary school teachers had described me as a 'future authoress or poetess.' Mother took me to meet Chicago's leading black librarian, who published a poem of mine in the magazine she edited for Negro children.

My first published writings were trying to take scientific concepts and make them clear for a general audience.

In junior high, I was still writing poems and stories. In college, I was a journalism major. When I got out of college, I went to work for an educational publisher, so I was still writing, developing curriculums.

I graduated with an English degree and worked for awhile in academic publishing.

Puerto Ricans are so well educated, they're so capable, they're so competent, but due to a lack of opportunity, when you graduate from college, you leave. Puerto Rico's number one export is human beings; Puerto Ricans!

I am always going to be in the hood in my heart, but what I did was added on the masters of arts, fine arts and the doctorate... if you want me to pull that out, I can get very distinguished... but I'm not going there... I don't have to put on airs; the knowledge comes out - just listen.

If there is still an American dream, reading is one of the bootstraps by which we can all pull ourselves up.

We should get rid of the SAT as fast as we can. Look, there are bigger problems in society. This is not the biggest problem we have. But it's so easy to get rid of it. Right? Just pull the plug.

One of the things that concerns me is that so few people who go and get an education elsewhere... feel any real... pull for returning home.

College is good discipline. That's what I learned there: pull an all-nighter, get it done, and get an A. I'm the biggest procrastinator, and I learned how to be an efficient procrastinator.

When I was first elected to the Colorado State Board of Education in 2000, we had to carry a big binder filled with hundreds of pages to every meeting. By 2004, the State Board had gone paperless. We even persuaded the less-tech-savvy members to use laptops to pull up their information during meetings.

After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.

Students were pulled aside to spend more time in art class, and I wasn't one of them.

I am a member of the London Library, and on almost every single job I do, there is some benefit to be had in going there and pulling two or three books off the shelves.

If a book isn't teaching me something, pulling something out of me, then it will be dull for me and the reader.

I think we actually punish children out of their relationship with their bodies... we categorically separate mind and body and emotion and intellect.

In America, educators punish those who actually think for themselves. There is only acceptance for popular opinion.

You can't punish the middle classes for going to drama school - you need to punish the education system and the associative governments for devaluing the arts.

I was a bad kid. I was a really naughty kid. I couldn't read or write. And that was me punishment - going to acting school.

My father gave me Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that.

Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.