In America we have big issues with education - in impoverished communities especially. I work with Teach For All, and so we're encouraging more people to get into teaching.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the challenges in the education system, particularly in disadvantaged areas, and emphasizes the need for more individuals to join the teaching profession.
In this quote, John Legend points out the significant educational disparities that exist in the United States, especially within impoverished communities. He advocates for greater efforts in education reform and supports initiatives like Teach For All, which aims to inspire and recruit more individuals to enter the teaching field. By doing so, he underscores the importance of quality education as a means to uplift communities and address social inequities.
In practice
During a conference on educational reform, I shared this quote by John Legend to highlight the importance of investing in teachers in disadvantaged areas.
Hip-hop is one of the most free art forms there is. There's so many sounds you can use, so many things you can bring in. You never know, man. I bet years ago people would've never said they would hear me with Rick Ross, and we did four classic songs together.
For me as a songwriter, I love when other people cover my songs.
To have the chance to see your music be elevated and to have almost universally positive response to that music, makes me feel better every day. I feel more confident and inspired, and that's fun.
Why wouldn't I help? What good reason do I have as a human being with power and a sense of empathy and morality, why wouldn't I do something?
I wrote the song "Show Me" as a prayer to God asking simple, honest questions about life and death and why there is so much suffering in the world. As I grew with the song I realized I shouldn't limit these questions solely to God; I should ask those questions of others and of myself.
Hip hop is usually a bunch of guys talking to a bunch of guys, in my experience. It's homosocial, not homosexual, in that it's almost always all one gender in a room where it's being created. That locker-room environment has an impact on the language. I think the music suffers 'cause it allows an almost cartoonish level of misogyny.
Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, theyβve made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.
It would be good if teachers could genuinely understand that black English is not mistakes, it's just different English, and that what you want to do is add an additional dialect to black students' repertoire rather than teaching them out of what's thought of as a bad habit, like sloppy posture or chewing with your mouth open.
No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.
Kids deserve the right to think that they can change the world.
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