You will find me standing up to my rack, as the people's faithful representative, and the public's most obedient, very humble servant.
Davy CrockettRead
I learned to read a little in my primer, to write my own name, and to cypher some in the three first rules in figures. And this was all the schooling I ever had in my life, up to this day. I should have continued longer if it hadn't been that I concluded I couldn't do any longer without a wife, and so I cut out to hunt me one.
Interpretation
Davy Crockett reflects on his limited formal education but hints at the importance of life experiences.
In this quote, Davy Crockett shares his perspective on education, emphasizing that his formal schooling was minimal, consisting only of learning to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. He further illustrates the significance of practical life choices by indicating that he prioritized finding a partner over pursuing further education, suggesting that life experiences can be just as valuable as academic learning.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of hands-on experiences, I might use this quote to show that formal education is just one path to knowledge.
You will find me standing up to my rack, as the people's faithful representative, and the public's most obedient, very humble servant.
We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.
True teaching liberates the student from his teacher.
There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all.
Everyone [in higher education] was what I call drillers of deeper wells. These academics sit at the bottom of a deep well and they look up and see a sliver of the sky. They know everything about that little sliver of sky and nothing else. I scan all my horizons.
Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
Education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians.
What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.
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