There is a huge gap between what students want for their future and what their schools are offering.
Interpretation
Students' aspirations often do not align with the education they receive.
This quote emphasizes the disconnect between students' ambitions for their future and the educational programs offered by schools. It suggests that the current educational system may not adequately prepare students for the realities of their desired paths, leading to a misalignment between student goals and available opportunities.
In practice
In a speech at a graduation ceremony, a speaker could use this quote to highlight the need for educational reform.
It's not that our high school system was not designed well, but that it was designed in 1906 when the country was just out of the industrial era. There hasn't been a substantial systemic change the way we do high school since then.
As a parent, you have to be good coach and bad coach, and I think in the college-application process, I didn't want to be bad coach. 'This is amazing! I'm so proud of you!' That's the role I wanted with my kids.
Regardless of zip code, talent and IQ are evenly distributed, so we need to make sure that opportunity is evenly distributed, too.
Teachers have told us across the country that what's severely outdated is the teacher at the front of the classroom as the font of knowledge, because as we know, access to knowledge and information is now ubiquitous. So instead, teachers want to help students learn how to think so that they can be lifelong learners.
Let's teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.
The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!
It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.
I'm sure I am impatient sometimes. I sure do get angry sometimes. I think it's outrageous how hard it is to get this country to feed its children and to take care of its children, to give them a decent education.
Schools are the single largest lever of mobility in this country. When we commit to creating and enforcing laws that acknowledge the injustice of the past, we open up the possibility of using schools as a means of reducing inequality.
Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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