We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
Angela DavisRead
When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.
Interpretation
Education should prioritize intellectual growth over strict discipline and security measures.
Angela Davis highlights the potentially harmful consequences of education systems that emphasize discipline and security above knowledge and learning. This quote critiques practices that prepare children for confinement instead of fostering their intellectual and personal development, suggesting that the environment in which they learn can shape their future opportunities and freedom.
In practice
In a discussion about school reform, this quote can emphasize the importance of prioritizing knowledge over discipline.
We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.
Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.
Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.
It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it's not going to solve the problems
Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root.'
I entered the University of Natal as a preliminary-year student in 1966 and stayed on to June 1972, when I was expelled from the university. I was then doing third-year medicine.
A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.
"It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever" he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?"
Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.
Books delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.
Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
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