When dictators feel their support slipping among adults, it is not unusual for them to alter school textbooks in the hope of enlisting impressionable youths in their cause.
Interpretation
Dictators often change educational content to manipulate young minds and secure their power.
This quote by Samantha Power emphasizes how authoritarian leaders may resort to altering educational materials in an attempt to sway the beliefs and values of the younger generation when they sense a loss of approval from adults. By targeting impressionable youths, dictators aim to instill loyalty and reshape societal norms, thus securing their political agenda and influence for the future.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about the importance of accurate educational content.
Sanctions did indeed help to bring Iran to the negotiating table. But sanctions did not stop the advance of Iran's nuclear program. Negotiations have done that, and it is in our interest not to deny ourselves the chance to achieve a long-term, comprehensive solution that would deny Iran a nuclear weapon.
Zimbabweans are severely malnourished, and deaths from starvation occur even in the cities. The country has not yet suffered nationwide famine only because international donors have stepped in.
Western governments have generally tried to contain genocide by appeasing its architects. But the sad record of the last century shows that the walls the United States tries to build around genocidal societies almost inevitably shatter.
No more than a surgeon can operate while tweeting can you reach your potential with one ear in, one ear out. You actually have to reacquaint yourself with concentration. We all do.
Throughout history, when societies face tough economic times, we have seen democratic reforms deferred, decreased trust in government, persecution of minority groups, and a general shrinking of the democratic space.
All advocacy is, at its core, an exercise in empathy.
I love walking into a bookstore. It's like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.
The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation.
Those who teach by their doctrine must teach by their life, or else they pull down with one hand what they build up with the other.
This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.
Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.
The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered.
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