Quotes by American Authors - Page 208

As long as high schools strive to list the number of Ivy League schools their graduates attend and teachers pile on work without being trained to identify stress-related symptoms, I fear for our children’s health. I am not mollified by the alums of my daughter’s school who return to tell everyone that the rigor of high school prepared them for college, making their first year easier than they’d anticipated.If they make it that far.
Candy Schulman
This larger goal wouldn’t be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing.
Robert M. Pirsig
Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it’s really learning. The questions, What’s being taught? What’s the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum.
Robert M. Pirsig
The more you know, the more you will be able to appreciate the beauty of life and your heart will desire to learn.
Debasish Mridha
I had also read somewhere that if a man didn't truly believe or understand what he was espousing, somehow he could do a more convincing job
Charles Bukowski
The best teacher teaches by inspiring students to learn by showing them the ultimate purpose of learning.
Debasish Mridha
We employ education and the convictions gained through the intermeshing of personal experiences and fresh ideas to establish the configuration of our being that in actuality was our mysterious potentiality from the very inception of our birth.
Kilroy J. Oldster
I don’t teach. I just show them why to learn, what to learn, how to learn, and the ultimate purpose of learning.
Debasish Mridha
Scientists are aware that all the lab-rat tests in the world, once compiled, can tell us only how lab rats act when tested, and that is how we must begin to view school: all that you can learn in a school classroom is what goes on inside a school classroom.
Anne Elizabeth Moore
Arleen thanked Pana. Getting off the phone, she thanked Jesus. She smiled. When she smiled she looked like a different person. The press had loosened its grip. From landlords, she had heard eighty-nine nos but one yes. Jori accepted his mother’s high five. He and his brother would have to switch schools. Jori didn’t care. He switched schools all the time. Between seventh and eighth grades, he had attended five different schools—when he went at all. At the domestic-violence shelter alone, Jori had racked up seventeen consecutive absences. Arleen saw school as a higher-order need, something to worry about after she found a house.
Matthew Desmond
For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them.
Anthony M. Esolen
Being articulate is no guarantee of intelligence,” Zoe said. “I’m not doubting the value of education. I’m doubting its reach. Highly educated politicians still do stupid things. Anthony Weiner was educated; Mugabi was educated; Assad was educated; Mussolini was educated. For all their education, look at them.
Michael Benzehabe
Confronting information that directly challenges existing beliefs can be psychologically threatening to people, especially if the information challenges their sense of identity.
Rachel Hilary Brown
I don't want to spend the rest of my life paying off loans when I don't even like school to begin with.
Robin Talley
The leaders and followers of the Harlem Renaissance were every bit as intent on using Black culture to help make the United States a more functional democracy as they were on employing Black culture to 'vindicate' Black people.
Aberjhani
Ignorance paired with arrogance (naïveté) is logical, but arrogance paired with awareness (ego) is toxic.
Richie Norton
To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future.
Thomas Frank
Education is one of the Grand Christianson Obsessions. They’ve been whole years my mother’s kept us home for intensive private study. As a result of that, Paul will perform the first brain transplant, James will someday build a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean, Charlie – who is an actual musical genius – will probably end up writing the Great American Symphony, and I – I know a little bit about a lot of t
Kristen D. Randle
The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for example, would give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics in any high school or college curriculum. Unfortunately, most curricula have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable because no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or trigonometry, or the classics. But no matter how valuable a subject may be, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose complexities are constantly challenging our intuitions, these trade-offs cannot responsibly be avoided.
Steven Pinker
In summary, a good teacher does the following:- never tells a student anything that the teacher thinks is true- never allows himself to be the ultimate judge of his own students' success- teacher practice first, theory second (if he must teach theory at all)- does not come up with lists of knowledge that every student must know- doesn't teach anything unless he can easily explain the use of learning it- assigns no homework, unless that homework is to produce something- groups students according to their interests and abilities, not their ages- ensures that any reward to a student is intrinsic- teaches students things they may actually need to know after they leave school- helps students come up with their own explanations when they have made a mistake- never assumes that a student is listening to what he is saying- never assumes that students will do what he asks them to do if what he asked does not relate to a goal they truly hold- never allows pleasing the teacher to be the goal of the student- understands that students won't do what he tells them if they don't understand what is being asked of them- earns the respect of students by demonstrating abilities- motivate students to do better, and does not help them to do better- understands that his job is to get students to do something- understands that experience, not teachers, changes belief systems- confuses students- does not expect credit for good teaching
Roger Schank
I'm not suggesting that teachers never tell the truth, only that it isn't necessary to do it all the time. Since coming to one's own conclusions is mostly how we learn, the real job of a teacher is to force students to come to sensible conclusions by confronting what they already believe with stuff that is antithetical to those beliefs. A confused person has only 2 choices. Admit he is confused and doesn't care, or resolve the confusion. Resolving the confusion invloves thinking. Teachers can encourage thinking by making sure students have something confusing to think about.
Roger Schank
Certain things need to be done again and again in life, but those things can be learned only in context, not as an abstraction. Different contexts must be provided in order to motivate students and to provide real world skills that will be remembered, not because they were studied and tested but because they were practicied again and again.
Roger Schank
Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations.
Steven Pinker
Ah. Well, it stands for Freedom From Morality. We don't think healthy amorality happens naturally." "But you're not amoral," I pointed out. I would trust you to keep your word any time. You don't steal. I've never known you to harm anyone except enemy soldiers in time of war." He laughed. "I didn't say 'immoral', I said amoral. You really didn't read your guidebook. A person who has a compulsive need to break moral commandments is as much a prisoner as the person who feels bound to obey them. And the human brain is hardwired to produce moral commandments. That is why we think you have to train young people to keep them from developing morality and blocking their pursuit of pleasure. I teach it because --" "It gives you an outlet for your sadistic urge to confuse children.
John Barnes
Watch movies. Read screenplays. Let them be your guide. […] Yes, McKee has been able to break down how the popular screenplay has worked. He has identified key qualities that many commercially successful screenplays share, he has codified a language that has been adopted by creative executives in both film and television. So there might be something of tangible value to be gained by interacting with his material, either in book form or at one of the seminars.But for someone who wants to be an artist, a creator, an architect of an original vision, the best book to read on screenwriting is no book on screenwriting. The best seminar is no seminar at all.To me, the writer wants to get as many outside voices OUT of his/her head as possible. Experts win by getting us to be dependent on their view of the world. They win when they get to frame the discussion, when they get to tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to think about the game, whatever the game is. Because that makes you dependent on them. If they have the secret rules, then you need them if you want toget ahead.The truth is, you do
Brian Koppelman
Mundane education is regrettably prosaic," - Jace Lightwood-Herondale
Cassandra Clare
Welcome to Hartford. The poorest city in the wealthiest state in the richest country on earth.
Susan Eaton
Trying to get more learning out of the present system is like trying to get the Pony Express to compete with the telegraph by breeding faster ponies.
Edward Fiske
Mogo living brings about true freedom. When you have the inner conviction to do the most good and the least harm, you are free to say no to media, social, and peer pressures. You are free from a nagging sense that your life does not have value or meaning. You are free to imagine and then create a truly successful (in the deepest meaning on the word) life. You are free to be at peace with yourself and all those whom your life touches.
Zoe Weil
It could be said that a liberal education has the nature of a bequest, in that it looks upon the student as the potential heir of a cultural birthright, whereas a practical education has the nature of a commodity to be exchanged for position, status, wealth, etc., in the future. A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past. The practical educators assume that human society itself is the only significant context, that change is therefore fundamental, constant, and necessary, that the future will be wholly unlike the past, that the past is outmoded, irrelevant, and an encumbrance upon the future -- the present being only a time for dividing past from future, for getting ready.But these definitions, based on division and opposition, are too simple. It is easy, accepting the viewpoint of either side, to find fault with the other. But the wrong is on neither side; it is in their division...Without the balance of historic value, practical education gives us that most absurd of standards: "relevance," based upon the suppositional needs of a theoretical future. But liberal education, divorced from practicality, gives something no less absurd: the specialist professor of one or another of the liberal arts, the custodian of an inheritance he has learned much about, but nothing from.
Wendell Berry
Why has pachinko swept Japan? It can hardly be the excitement of gambling, since the risks and rewards are so small. During the hours spent in front of a pachinko machine, there is an almost total lack of stimulation other than the occasional rush of ball bearings. There is no thought, no movement; you have no control over the flow of balls, apart from holding a little lever which shoots them up to the top of the machine; you sit there enveloped in a cloud of heavy cigarette smoke, semi-dazed by the racket of millions of ball bearings falling through machines around you. Pachinko verges on sensory deprivation. It is the ultimate mental numbing, the final victory of the educational system." - Lost Japan, Eng. vers., 1996
Alex Kerr
Getting an education is an awfully wearing process!
Jean Webster
I spent half my childhood trying to be like my dad. True for most boys, I think. It turns with adolescence. The last thing I wanted was to be like my dad. It took becoming a man to realize how lucky I’d been. It took a few hard knocks in life to make me realize the only thing my dad had ever wanted or worked for was to give me a chance at being better than him.
Tucker Elliot
There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.
Jonathan Kozol
Each day we wake up and make myriad choices that affect others. We clothe ourselves with shirts, pants, and shoes that may have been sewn together by women working in factories fourteen-plus hours a day for a nonliving wage; we buy products manufactured in ways the destroy forests, pollute waterways, and poison the air; we wash our hair with shampoos that may have been squeezed into the eyes of conscious rabbits or force-fed to them in quantities that kill; and on and on. As Derrick Jensen has written in his book "The Culture of Make Believe", "It is possible to destroy a culture without being aware of its existence. It is possible to commit genocide or ecocide from the comfort of one's living room
Zoe Weil
Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
Sydney Harris
Hey, Geekoid!" yelled Duncan Dougal, "Why do you read so much? Don't you know how to watch TV?
Bruce Coville
A Swedish minister having assembled the chiefs of the Susquehanna Indians, made a sermon to them, acquainting them with the principal historical facts on which our religion is founded — such as the fall of our first parents by eating an apple, the coming of Christ to repair the mischief, his miracles and suffering, etc. When he had finished an Indian orator stood up to thank him.‘What you have told us,’ says he, ‘is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all into cider. We are much obliged by your kindness in coming so far to tell us those things which you have heard from your mothers. In return, I will tell you some of those we have heard from ours.‘In the beginning, our fathers had only the flesh of animals to subsist on, and if their hunting was unsuccessful they were starving. Two of our young hunters, having killed a deer, made a fire in the woods to boil some parts of it. When they were about to satisfy their hunger, they beheld a beautiful young woman descend from the clouds and seat herself on that hill which you see yonder among the Blue Mountains.‘They said to each other, “It is a spirit that perhaps has smelt our broiling venison and wishes to eat of it; let us offer some to her.” They presented her with the tongue; she was pleased with the taste of it and said: “Your kindness shall be rewarded; come to this place after thirteen moons, and you will find something that will be of great benefit in nourishing you and your children to the latest generations.” They did so, and to their surprise found plants they had never seen before, but which from that ancient time have been constantly cultivated among us to our great advantage. Where her right hand had touched the ground they found maize; where her left had touched it they found kidney-beans; and where her backside had sat on it they found tobacco.’The good missionary, disgusted with this idle tale, said: ‘What I delivered to you were sacred truths; but what you tell me is mere fable, fiction, and falsehood.’The Indian, offended, replied: ‘My brother, it seems your friends have not done you justice in your education; they have not well instructed you in the rules of common civility. You saw that we, who understand and practise those rules, believed all your stories; why do you refuse to believe ours?
Benjamin Franklin
People need to be educated so that they can make intelligent moral choices
Gary L. Francione
So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience.
William James
Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.
Lorrie Moore
All it takes for generosity to flow is awareness. By actively pursuing awareness and knowledge, we can make choices that cause less harm and greater good to others in the global community of our shared earth.
Zoe Weil
It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic coaching for his scholastic difficulties.
Alice Duer Miller
Someday, I hope that we will all be patriots of our planet and not just of our respective nations.
Zoe Weil
Transparency is critical in public health and epidemics laypeople become either effective force-multipliers or stubborn walls.
T.K. Naliaka
Hard work works harder than luck!
Germany Kent
You see it as me going back. I see it as me staying on track.
Germany Kent
But if you forgive someone for something they did to you, it doesn’t mean you agree with what they did or believe it was right. Forgiving that person means you have chosen not to dwell on the matter anymore; you have moved on with your life.
Idowu Koyenikan
Far too often the ‘things’ that men define as success do little more than successfully destroy the lives of the very men who achieve those ‘things.’ And while I must admit that there is an authentic element of success in all of that, it’s the kind of success that I would much prefer to successfully avoid.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
At the very moment when people underestimate you is when you can make a breakthrough.
Germany Kent
Despite the voices of the culture that would scream otherwise, victory is irreparably tied to the surrender of self. And that explains why so few are truly victorious.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s one thing to set a goal. It’s another, however, when you get so caught up in the details that you neglect to review your progress. Reevaluation enables you to improve your aim to ensure you hit your target.
Susan C.Young
Are there things in your life that could use a face lift? What neglected treasures could be given new life by restoring them to their former glory? When you renovate and restore, you show respect for what was and bring it back to a state of beauty, usefulness, value, or vigor.
Susan C.Young
Reconsideration creates a great opportunity for you to contemplate a previous decision, opinion, action, behavior, or position. “Second-guessing” can at times be very helpful. Have you ever felt strongly about something, but when you reconsidered new information which came to light you changed your position?
Susan C.Young
Revise what you need to as changes occur and new information becomes available. Be willing to go back, look again, and consider where and how you can make adjustments in order to stay in alignment with your vision, mission, passion, and purpose. Rather than rehashing the past, know that your life is a working draft and you can revise the story you write about it. Let the revising begin.
Susan C.Young
Successfully juggling the demands of your personal and professional life may feel like a daunting and unrealistic task. Employers know all too well that if an employee’s personal life is suffering, their work life will too. And visa-versa. Even the most self-aware and diligent person can be challenged. How can you rebalance your life to prevent burnout and promote well-being?
Susan C.Young
Have you ever experienced a shattering in your own personal life? Where death, divorce, financial loss, failure, or disaster changed your world to such an extent that you weren’t sure how to rebuild again? Clearing the debris from the aftermath is a great first step. It enables you to start with a clean slate so you can rebuild exactly what you desire. Where can you begin?
Susan C.Young
We are engineered for health, vitality, and resilience, yet we tend to lose a lot as the years go by. What pleasures have you denied yourself? What dreams did you once hold dear? What do you want now? Restore them to their former glory and recapture that which brings you joy.
Susan C.Young
When you yearn to create positive change, stop focusing on your old stories. If you hope to transform your life from the inside out and become a new improved version of your former self, refocus on what you want rather than what you don’t
Susan C.Young
The great thing about redirecting is that if you miss the mark and miss your goal, you can simply change course. When you are heading down a certain path, and feel like you may be heading the wrong way, stop, turn back, redirect, or ask for directions.
Susan C.Young