If freedom makes social progress possible, so social progress strengthens and enlarges freedom. The two are inseparable partners in the great adventure of humanity.
It is one thing to open the schools to all children regardless of race. It is another to train the teachers, to build the classrooms, and to attempt to eliminate the effects of past educational deficiencies. It is still another to find ways to feed the incentive to learn and keep children in school.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Opening schools to all is not enough; comprehensive measures are needed to ensure quality education for every child.
This quote by Robert Kennedy highlights the complexities involved in achieving true educational equality. Merely allowing all children access to schools is insufficient; it is crucial to focus on training teachers, improving infrastructure, addressing historical inequities, and fostering a learning environment that incentivizes student participation and retention. Educational reform requires a multifaceted approach to truly empower all students.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a school board meeting discussing funding for teacher training, one might quote Kennedy to emphasize the need for comprehensive educational reform.
More from Robert Kennedy
All quotes →Elections remind us not only of the rights but the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy.
Within the United States, we have put great emphasis upon political freedoms. Because it has been our experience that these freedoms can lead to others.
It is one thing to open job opportunities. It is another to train people to fill them, or to persuade American enterprise to seek Negro as well as white applicants.
Our attitude towards immigration reflects our faith in the American ideal. We have always believed it possible for men and women who start at the bottom to rise as far as the talent and energy allow. Neither race nor place of birth should affect their chances.
The Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America - except whether we are proud to be Americans.
Similar quotes
I think the most important thing we can teach our kids for their long-term health and happiness is how to cook.
A man's college and university degrees mean nothing to me until I see what he is able to do with them.
What is important for kids to learn is that no matter how much money they have, earn, win, or inherit, they need to know how to spend it, how to save it, and how to give it to others in need. This is what handling money is about, and this is why we give kids an allowance.
A college education is not a quantitative body of memorized knowledge salted away in a card file. It is a taste for knowledge, a taste for philosophy, if you will; a capacity to explore, to question to perceive relationships, between fields of knowledge and experience.
I've learned that education, experience, and memories are three things that no one can take away from you.
In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!