How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the urgent need to reform education to prevent high dropout rates among inner-city children, which can lead to negative future outcomes.
Grace Lee Boggs highlights a critical social issue: the failure of the education system to support inner-city children adequately, leading to high dropout rates. This quote urges society to rethink and redefine educational practices to create a system that fosters success rather than failure, as the consequences of neglecting this issue can result in an increased number of young people ending up in the criminal justice system.
In practice
In a speech to educators at a conference about urban education reform.
We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses.
People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.
We urgently need a paradigm shift in our concept of the purposes and practices of education. We need to leave behind the concept of education as a passport to more money and higher status in the future and replace it with a concept of education as an ongoing process that enlists the tremendous energies and creativity of schoolchildren in rebuilding and respiriting our communities and our cities now, in the present.
You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.
Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change. Donβt get stuck in old ideas.
The struggle we're dealing with these days, which, I think, is part of what the 60s represented, is how do we define our humanity?
The films I've made for children have been my hardest work, my best, because kids deserve the best.
Books are the air I breathe, so I don't notice the seasons.
I speak as a man of the world to men of the world; and I say to you, Search the Scriptures! The Bible is the book of all others, to be read at all ages, and in all conditions of human life; not to be read once or twice or thrice through, and then laid aside, but to be read in small portions of one or two chapters every day, and never to be intermitted, unless by some overruling necessity.
Everyone engaged in research must have had the experience of working with feverish and prolonged intensity to write a paper which no one else will read or to solve a problem which no one else thinks important and which will bring no conceivable reward - which may only confirm a general opinion that the researcher is wasting his time on irrelevancies.
If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people.
People who don't vote have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests.
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