Everything hinges on education. Without it, you can't advocate for proper health care, for housing, for a civil rights bill that ensures your rights.
Interpretation
Education is the foundation for advocacy and social change.
In this quote, Susan L. Taylor emphasizes the critical role of education in empowering individuals to advocate for their rights and address social issues such as health care and housing. Without a proper education, people lack the knowledge and skills needed to fight for equality and justice, making education a pivotal element in the pursuit of civil rights and societal advancement.
In practice
During a speech about social justice, you could quote this to underline the importance of education in driving change.
We are here to love, not to judge. I'd been blaming and raging. I certainly wasn't loving my daughter that afternoon as God loves me. God's love doesn't insist on perfection or even good common sense. Why then should I demand more of those I love? With this tiny change in perspective I began to see the need for correction wasn't in my daughter, but in me.
When I joined 'Essence,' I was a young, single mother. I was 24. I hadn't gone to college. I wasn't making any money at 'Essence' - what was it, $500 a month - and I was struggling. So I was always looking down the road, always hoping for a better, you know, tomorrow.
We don't have time to waste. Our communities are crumbling; our children are under siege. Failing schools and a for-profit prison-industrial complex are sucking the life out of black homes and communities. We are not going down like this!
It's hunger. It's homelessness, often. It's underfunded, under-resourced schools. It's abuse beyond the chilling. It's having overwhelmed parents and caregivers. Those are the things that young people are struggling with beyond our view.
We women feel we are here to serve. That's the mistake we make. We may have children, husbands, lovers, bills, responsibility. Those things don't own us, but too often we let them.
Without education, there is no hope for our people and without hope, our future is lost
Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators...not conformists
I want to start two institutions, one in Madras and one in Calcutta, to carry out my plan; and that plan briefly is to bring the Vedantic ideals into the everyday practical life of the saint or the sinner, of the sage or the ignoramus, of the Brahmin or the Pariah.
But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.
Teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions
I began going to juvenile prisons. And some of these kids face some very, very tough lives. How do they handle these lives? Do they even know that if their life is bad, that they're still OK? Do they know that? Do they know that someone is thinking the same way that they're thinking?
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