We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.
Anne Sullivan MacyRead
The wrong things are predominantly stressed in the schools - things remote from the student's experience and need.
Interpretation
This quote highlights how schools often focus on irrelevant subjects rather than the immediate experiences and needs of students.
Anne Sullivan Macy emphasizes the flaws in educational systems, pointing out that they tend to prioritize topics that are disconnected from the real-life experiences and requirements of students, which can hinder their engagement and learning. The quote calls for a reevaluation of curricula to make education more relevant and meaningful to students' lives.
In practice
This quote can be used to critique outdated school curricula during an educational reform meeting.
We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.
Obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of the child.
Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences...Language and knowledge are indissolubly connected; they are interdependent. Good work in language presupposes and depends on a real knowledge of things.
You cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love you would not be happy or want to play.
If the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself.
It is a rare privilege to watch the birth, growth, and first feeble struggles of a living mind; this privilege is mine.
You can never learn anything that you did not already know
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.
Don't be afraid to ask the 'dumb' question, everyone else will be relieved you had the guts to ask!
The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed. It is better to treat an adolescent as if he had greater value than he actually shows than as if he had less and let him feel that his merits and self-respect are disregarded.
Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.
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