If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.
Interpretation
Educating girls has a broader impact on society than educating boys.
This quote emphasizes the profound effect that educating girls has on a community compared to educating boys. It suggests that when girls are educated, they not only gain knowledge and skills for themselves, but they also uplift their families and communities, leading to societal improvements in health, economics, and overall well-being.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of girls' education at a conference.
Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they've learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.
If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.
You can hand out condoms, drop bombs, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won’t change.
If we try to resolve terrorism with military might and nothing else, then we will be no safer than we were before 9/11. If we truly want a legacy of peace for our children, we need to understand that this is a war that will ultimately be won with books, not with bombs.
In times of war, you often hear leaders—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—saying, ‘God is on our side.’ But that isn’t true. In war, God is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans.
In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education.
In a library, you can find small miracles and truth, and you might find something that will make you laugh so hard that you will get shushed, in the friendliest way. I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space. So this afternoon, I'll walk to the library.
To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.
Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.
I don't think that everyone should become a mathematician, but I do believe that many students don't give mathematics a real chance.
All around me, I see girls forced to become rat racers in the College Application Industrial Complex, the subculture where students must craft themselves into the perfect specimens for college admission and often lose their authenticity, love of learning, and sense of self in the process.
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