Remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society.
Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Education should be focused on enhancing the lives of individuals and making positive changes in society.
Marian Wright Edelman's quote emphasizes the fundamental purpose of education as a tool for uplifting individuals and communities. It highlights that true education goes beyond personal advancement; it encompasses a responsibility to use knowledge and skills to improve the world around us. By learning, we gain the ability to contribute positively, ensuring that our influence results in a better future for others.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a graduation speech, one might say, 'As Marian Wright Edelman stated, education is for improving the lives of others, reminding us to use our knowledge for social betterment.'
More from Marian Wright Edelman
All quotes βFar less wealthy industrialized countries have committed to end child poverty, while the United States is sliding backwards. We can do better. We must demand that our leaders do better.
Dr. King used to say, 'I was sitting in the back of the bus, but my mind was always up front.' Don't let anybody tell you that you can't do it. You aim high and you work very hard and now I think it's clear that you can be anything you want to.
The outside world told black kids when I was growing up that we weren't worth anything. But our parents said it wasn't so, and our churches and our schoolteachers said it wasn't so. They believed in us, and we, therefore, believed in ourselves.
I was taught that the world had a lot of problems; that I could struggle and change them; that intellectual and material gifts brought the privilege and responsibility of sharing with others less fortunate; and that service is the rent each of us pays for living - the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time or after you have reached your personal goals.
We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who will keep seeding and building transforming movements.
Similar quotes
It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulations and in understanding its conceptual foundations, enhances a person's ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision-making
Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge.
There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
In the 1970s, what I, as a young foreign student studying in the United States, found most dynamic, exciting and impressive about this country is what much of the world continues to value most about the U.S. today: its open intellectual culture, its great universities, its capacity for discovery and innovation.
If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget. Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition, they're suffering from childhood.
The only condition a library asks its users to honor is to do justice to their own imagination, their own curiosity and their own thirst for knowledge, and in the process, to achieve their own independence of mind and spirit.