The grateful savants had accepted, and they were spending the rest of their lives reading fifteenth-hand opinions, taking pleasant naps, and drooling out to yawning students the anemic and wordy bookishness which they called learning.
Sinclair Lewis
» Sinclair Lewis - all quotes »
In the development of intelligence nothing can be more "basic" than learning how to ask productive questions. Many years ago, in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Charles Weingartner and I expressed our astonishment at the neglect shown in school toward this language art. ...The "back to the basics" philosophers rarely mention it, and practicing teachers usually do not find room for it in their curriculums. …all our knowledge results from questions, which is another way of saying that question-asking is our most important intellectual tool… There are at present no reading tests anywhere that measure the ability of students to address probing questions to the particular texts they are reading... What students need to know are the rules of discourse which comprise the subject, and among the most central of such rules are those which govern what is and what is not a legitimate question.
Neil Postman
But it was amazing to see this man crying, and grateful to God for this, and to love this animal as if it was his child. Well, events took a turn for the bittersweet when he let me know last night that he's moving, out of town, even, and he's taking Has Wounds with him (and yes, he called her that.) And he wanted to thank me again. And my only reply was "what else could I have done, but more?" So — I should not ever see her again, I think — but had I not gotten the Grace to happen to come across this man, thanks to God, at my door, I would have assumed that she had died. So I'm very grateful that I got to see him, and we got to pray together and embrace each other, and know what really was going on, all this time we were afraid. Well, she was right next door for either one of us. And it was very funny too, that this man's name was Francisco, because it's very much a St. Francis story, with an animal, you know?
Ysabella Brave
For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans: the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means also taking full responsibility for our own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism. They must always believe that they can write their own destiny.
Barack Obama
When students' language, culture and experience are ignored or excluded in classroom interactions, students are immediately starting from a disadvantage. Everything they have learned about life and the world up to this point is being dismissed as irrelevant to school learning; there are few points of connection to curriculum materials or instruction and so students are expected to learn in an experiential vacuum. Students' silence and nonparticipation under these conditions have frequently been interpreted as lack of academic ability or effort, and teachers’ interactions with students have reflected a pattern of low expectations which become self-fulfilling.
Jim Cummins
Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. … It is at the same time a training in boldness. … It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions
Leo Strauss
Lewis, Sinclair
Lewis, Wyndham
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