Middle-class families know education begins at birth.
Geoffrey CanadaRead
Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now?
Interpretation
The quote questions the outdated methods of teaching despite advancements in technology and health.
Geoffrey Canada highlights the need for educational reform by comparing past teaching methods to today's, suggesting that the education system has not evolved in response to the societal and technological changes we have experienced. This comment reflects frustration over the stagnant nature of educational practices while the world around us has significantly progressed.
In practice
In a speech advocating for educational reform, this quote could emphasize the need for modern teaching methods.
Middle-class families know education begins at birth.
I want to be a children’s hero… Children need heroes because heroes give hope; without hope they have no future.
When kids know that you refuse to let them fail ... they don't give up as easy. So sometimes they don't have it inside, [but] they're like,'You know, I don't want to do this, but I know my mother's going to be mad.'That matters to kids, and it helps get them through.
Kids who are poor often have families that have not really been kept informed about... how important it is to read to your child, to reduce stresses in their life, to use positive incentives and words.
I want my kids to graduate from high school. But that's not enough. I also want them to go to college. Why? Because rich people's kids go to college. And if that's good enough for them, it's good enough for my kids. Because you know what? College graduates don't tend to go to jail as frequently as nongraduates.
People don't believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don't have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don't get better.
Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.
Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.
One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.
But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
Young men and women, your education is ever important - to us, to you, and to God.
Libraries are not just for reading in, but for sociable thinking, exploring, exchanging ideas and falling in love. They were never silent. Technology will not change that, for even in the starchiest heyday of Victorian self-improvement, libraries were intended to be meeting places of the mind, recreational as well as educational.
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