Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.
In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the disparity between investment in educational infrastructure and the inadequate compensation of teachers, emphasizing the consequences of such neglect.
Louis L'Amour's quote addresses the misguided priorities in the American educational system, where substantial funds are allocated to buildings and facilities rather than fair salaries for teachers, who are crucial in shaping the future of society. He warns that if society fails to invest adequately in its educators, the resulting citizens may reflect the shortcomings of the system, suggesting a direct correlation between teacher support and the quality of future generations.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a school board meeting, when discussing budget allocations.
More from Louis L'Amour
All quotes →One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes. Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the first time things invisible before become suddenly visible.
Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.
If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter.
Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party.
Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it's hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.
Similar quotes
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As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.
It's never enough to just tell people about some new insight. Rather, you have to get them to experience it a way that evokes its power and possibility. Instead of pouring knowledge into people's heads, you need to help them grind anew set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way.
Competitive skills are desperately needed by poor children in America, and realistic recognition of the economic roles that they may someday have an opportunity to fill is obviously important, too. But there is more to life, and there ought to be much more to childhood, than readiness for economic functions.
Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.