Quotes on Schools

History education in schools is so poor that students often enter college ignorant of the past - and leave just as unenlightened.

Schooling should not be left to the whim or wealth of village elders. I believe that we should fund all schools in the U.S. with our national resources. All these kids are being educated to be Americans, not citizens of Minneapolis or San Francisco.

As we segregate by income into different communities, schools in lower-income areas have fewer resources than ever.

What are called 'public schools' in many of America's wealthy communities aren't really 'public' at all. In effect, they're private schools, whose tuition is hidden away in the purchase price of upscale homes there, and in the corresponding property taxes.

By including children with different learning abilities in mainstream and specialized schools, we can change attitudes and promote respect. By creating suitable jobs for adults with autism, we integrate them into society.

I have seen schools across the country working long and hard to embed a commitment to the unlimited development of every student into their cultures. The result, in terms of motivated learners and test scores, often is spectacular.

Schools should be diverse if we are to get past racial differences.

Schools connect children to their communities. Jobs connect adults to their societies. Persons with autism deserve to walk the same path.

It is possible to take a population of students who are failing and whose schools are failing them, who are being written off as not being college material, and if they have the right support, they can all go to college and succeed.

Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.

I've seen schools in Detroit where the windows are broken, where there's no heat, and children are sitting with their coats on in class in the middle of a snowstorm. I've also seen schools in California with Olympic-sized swimming pools and cafeterias like five-star restaurants.

If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent.

It's a wonderful story for the gun lobby to tell that if you just load up schools with weapons, you'll be safer. All of the evidence suggests that homes and communities that have more weapons have more gun crimes, not less.

I have seen girls tackle every single big problem from cancer to lead poisoning to climate change to homelessness to bullying in schools. There is literally no problem that we can't solve.

I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning.

The trouble is not that schools don't work; they do. They're excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain - and who then use the servants produced by ghetto schools.

I grew up in a segregated community: I couldn't go to the public schools, beaches, certain parts of town.

We don't have time to waste. Our communities are crumbling; our children are under siege. Failing schools and a for-profit prison-industrial complex are sucking the life out of black homes and communities. We are not going down like this!

Every day seems to bring news about another for-profit college scam. Hundreds of thousands of students have been deceived, misled, and harassed into enrolling at these schools where they end up with a mountain of debt and a worthless degree.

Schools shouldn't have to choose between serving a student with special needs or cutting an art class, laying off teachers or using outdated textbooks. But these are the positions that far too many schools have been placed in, and only a meaningful acknowledgment of the problem can begin the process of getting them out.

My message was 'Think African. Make schools read African history.'