We Cannot Have Both

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

-- Abraham Flexner, educator (1866-1959)

Next In Importance

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

-- James A. Garfield (1831-1881), 20th President of the US, letter accepting the Republican nomination to run for President, 12 July 1880

Sesame Street

Sally, you've never seen a street like Sesame Street. Everything happens here. You're gonna love it!

-- Gordon Robinson (character), the very first line spoken on the very first episode, 10 November 1969. Sesame Street is the longest running children's program on US television.

Obama School Speech

The story of America isn't about people who quit when things got tough. It's about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It's the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what's your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

-- President Barack Obama, addressing students from Wakefield HS, 8 September 2009

Imagine

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Inquiry

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

-- William James Durant (1885-1981), American historian, teacher, philosopher

Education

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul.

-- Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 - 17 June 1719), English politician and writer, The Spectator magazine, No. 215, 6 November 1711

Ebert v. Columbine

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about Basketball Diaries?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

-- Roger Ebert, in his review of the movie "Elephant", November 7, 2003

Like It Or Not

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.

-- Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), British Biologist, Educator

Informed Voters

I don't think anything will change until Americans revolt and get it into their heads that they need to be informed voters instead of just listening to the paid political ads.

-- Deborah Pryce, a United States representative from Ohio who is retiring, New York Times, 30 October 2007

In Defense Of Cheating

[O]ur current educational methods ... test by requiring students to prove that they can regurgitate the information presented in class without assistance from others .... But in real life, asking others for help is not only permitted, it is encouraged. Why not rethink the entire purpose of our examination system? We should be encouraging students to learn how to use all possible resources to come up with effective answers to important problems. Students should be encouraged to ask others for help, and they should also be taught to give full credit to those others. So, the purpose of this contribution to Ubiquity is to offer an alternative approach: to examine the origins of cheating, and by solving the root cause, to simultaneously reduce or eliminate cheating while enhancing learning.

-- Donald A. Norman, Professor of Computer Science, Northwestern University, Ubiquity, Volume 6, Issue 11, 29 September 2008

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i11_norman.html

Knock Yourself On The Head

Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.

-- Horace Mann, educational reformer (1796-1859)

Abstinent

People can be abstinent, and it's not weird.

-- Jami Waite, a teenager in Hallsville, Texas, New York Times, 18 July 2007

Not The Will To Believe

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

-- Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)

To Set A Limit

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.

-- Bertolt Brecht (10 Feb 1898 - 14 Aug 1956), German socialist dramatist, stage director, and poet, in "Science"

The Most Useful Gift

I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Important Decisions

The interesting thing is that there are so few important decisions. You don't have to go in the "right" direction. You don't have to enter the "right" business. What you have to do is have made a decision as to what you're going to do and then you just have to figure out how to succeed at it.

-- Ken Oshman, CEO & Chairman of the Board, Echelon Corporation

It Will Not Matter

One hundred years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, how big my house was, or what kind of car I drove. But the world may be a little better, because I was important in the life of a child.

-- Dr. Forest E. Witcraft (1894-1967), scholar, teacher, and Boy Scout administrator, Scouting Magazine, October 1950, p2

Not At The Library

Earth to parents: No. If you have to call the library and ask if your child is here, the answer is no. I know your child probably told you he'd be at the library, but what that really means is he didn't want to tell you where he was going to be, either because he hadn't decided yet, or because he just doesn't want you to know. This is true for children of all ages, but of course it goes double for teenagers.

Almost all kids who come to the library come with their parents. If you aren't here, then your kids almost certainly aren't here either. Yes, we do have kids in the library all the time who are not accompanied by their parents, but it's the same two or three dozen kids all the time. If your child were one of them, you would know.

Let me reiterate that: if your child were one of the ones who comes to the library, you would know. If you have to ask, then he's not here. Please stop calling the library and asking if your child is here. Your child is not here.

-- Rant by librarian Jonadab, 5/23/2007 04:35:00 PM mistersanity.blogspot.com

Less And Less Obvious

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

-- R. Buckminster Fuller

When We Teach

When we teach a child to draw, we teach him how to see. When we teach a child to play a musical instrument, we teach her how to listen. When we teach a child to dance, we teach him how to move through life with grace. When we tach a child to read and write, we teach her how to think. When we nurture imagination, we create a better world, one child at a time.

-- Jane Alexander

Not The First

You'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them -- if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

-- J. D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye

Presidential Scholars

We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions, and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants.

-- Excerpt from a letter signed by 50 Presidential Scholars, presented to President George W. Bush, June 25, 2007

Rearing Our Children In Captivity

We are rearing our children in captivity -- their habitat shrinking almost daily. In 1970 the average nine-year-old girl would have been free to wander 840 meters from her front door. In 1997 it was 280 metres. Now the limit appears to have come down to the front doorstep.

-- Mark Easton, Home editor, BBC News, 4 June 2007

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6720661.stm

He Who Learns Must Suffer

He who learns must suffer
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despite, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

-- Aeschylus

Zedonk

T I P W O R L D
http://www.tipworld.com
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W O R D O R I G I N S
September 22nd, 2000

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TODAY'S WORD: ZEDONK

(ZEE-dongk)
(n.) The offspring of a male zebra and a female donkey

Yes, there is such a thing, and "zedonk" is what you get, linguistically speaking, when you cross a "zebra" with a "donkey."

By the way, in case you need a synonym, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that you can use "zonkey" instead of "zedonk."

And while you'd be forgiven for assuming that a "zebrass" is the unfortunate result of sitting too long on certain lawn chairs, it's actually yet another name for this hybrid critter.

"Yes, a lovely farm indeed, but would you happen to own any zedonks?"

Martha Barnette is the author of Ladyfingers & Nun's Tummies: A Lighthearted Look at How Foods Got Their Names. She's also the word maven at http://www.funwords.com.

Tolerance

The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage, the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principal of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think.

-- Helen Keller

What We Do Not Want To Know

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

-- Eric Hoffer