Education in the United States

"College students have always shown a more or less marked tendency to form themselves into societies."

"In the earlier days when the 'college secret societies' were tabooed, the undergraduate members wore no pins or concealed them. Now these are worn constantly over the members' hearts."

"Alcohol is the No. 1 issue on every college campus I've been on. [But] it isn't just the No. 1 issue in fraternities and sororities. It's the number one issue for all students."

"Brothers, I have received medals and honors from every civilized country, but I feel this honor above all, due to the fact that this is given to me by a group of university bandsmen who are furthering the great work to which I have dedicated my life. The ideals as set forth by the Fraternity could not help but make better men and better college band musicians."

"The very name "fraternity" breathes friendship and communion of souls and I am very proud of my membership in Kappa Kappa Psi. … We, as I have repeated before, must look in the future for talent from the college and high school bands and surely a great many excellent players will no doubt grow out of the instruction received by bright American college men."

"Let us ever strive for the best and highest there is in us and in wishing every Kappa Kappa Psi the most bountiful success in all that he undertakes, let me venture this for our watchword: "Let every worthy group of College bandsmen in the country know about our ideals so that they too may be admitted into our Fraternal circles.""

"Kappa Kappa Psi operates principally as a service-recognition society whose chief aim is to assist the Director in developing the leadership and enthusiasm that he requires of his band. Our goals are to not only provide the band with organized and concentrated service activities, but to give our membership valid and wholesome experiences in organization, leadership, and social contacts. The honorary nature of membership is based on our premise that "it is an honor to be selected to serve"—this band, its department of music, its sponsoring institution and the cause of band music in the nation's colleges and universities..."

"This ol' guitar taught me how to score, Right there on that Lambda Chi porch, Mary Ann taught me a little more, About wanting what you can't have."

"The advent of other Greek letter fraternities met the social needs or supposed needs of underclass men and left Phi Beta Kappa to give sole concern to scholarly affairs."

"I got a great education when I was an undergraduate many years ago, and I think being a member of Phi Kappa Psi Maryland Alpha chapter was a part of that. Its something that's helped form my life. Dealings with my family, my dealings with my friends, my dealings with all my business associates. It was a great experience and I can say nothing but good things about Phi Kappa Psi."

"I can remember laughter and a lot of it, and the warmth of friendships and a lot of it, and it never went away."

"Let us be what we say we are: a fraternity, not a club, run by men, and not boys, and based on ideals, not expediency."

"I certainly didn't have the high school background, in math for example, to be in engineering school. and yet a couple of my fraternity brothers, who were brilliant scholars - electrical engineers, sort of took me under their wing, and without that personal tutoring and help, I wouldn't have gotten out of Valpo."

"...One of the things that the Phi Kappa Psi has to offer a young man is not to feel like you're ever going to be a cookie-cut stamped out sort of figure...To have that wonderful kind of anchor of a fraternal group is a great help to a undergraduate student trying to find his way in this tough and rather impersonal world today."

"I don't think that college would be the same to me if I didn't have the backing and the help of the people in the Fraternity... I was a Phi Psi when I got here, and I left a Phi Psi."

"The spirit of our oldest chapters, combined with the vigor of our youngest who join each year, should inspire all of us to maintain our faith in the principles which unite us, our determination to live by them, and our intention to continue to be the very best fraternity in the greek letter world."

"Fraternities and the fraternity system are a distinctive and praiseworthy feature of American college life. Both as a fraternity man and as an educator, I firmly believe in the value of fraternities when they are properly managed and under good leadership."

"Today, the American people, perhaps as never before, are in need of the unusual, the distinctive, the uncommon man and leader — men and women of character and courage who have undergone the disciplines and the experiences which develop their highest potentials. I sincerely believe that college fraternities are important institutions contributing to the development of such men and women."

"I shall never be able to compensate my fraternity for all that it has done for me, no matter what service I may be allowed to give. In it I have found my most intimate friends. As undergraduate chapter president, I gained broad administrative experience, and from my fraternity I have derived my most cherished ideals of conduct."

"My chapter house was a place where deep friendships were formed. The bond of brotherhood within the chapters was always a sustaining force and an urge to do a better job scholastically and otherwise in campus life. The traits of character which were nurtured there ripened and increased my sense of being useful in later life."

"In my judgment the college fraternity has been of inestimable value in making men across the years... It is natural for men to come together in compatible, mutual friendship, and when they do so under the high ideals of a fraternity, it proves to be most beneficial."

"I took a great deal more from my fraternity than I gave — but what I took was a very great deal — companionship of the highest order, self-confidence born of belonging to a group of which I was proud, enrichment of my personal life, which gave all my college career added dimension, and even an extra bond to several life-long friendships that already existed."

"I found in my chapter companionship and guidance from older men, discipline and true fellowship. The fraternity is more than just a boarding house. It is a temple of good will, of mutual assistance and enlightenment. The benefits derived are constant companions with alert fellow students in all activities of university life, and it tends to create more mature, responsible and intelligent citizens."

"Tau Epsilon Phi has a sweetheart so shy, She's a dream, what a dream of a girl. Each brother she holds as the emeralds unfold In her heart she's as pure as a pearl."

"[D]edicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it."

"Today, if somebody comes up with a new phrase or word, it is spread instantly. Instead of weeks and months, now it takes milliseconds. It doesn't mean these terms will last forever, just that they're suddenly here."

"You'd have to ask Bill Clinton or Bob Dole why it was so important. We are merely recognizing its importance."

"The term goes back 50 years, but you can't turn on the radio or television without hearing about 'weapons of mass destruction'."

"There is no scientific method of determining which words or phrases will be named words-of-the-year. It's kind of like Time magazine determining the whistle-blowers were the person-of-the-year. There is no objective way of determining it. It's all done with a show of hands."

"Language changes, and you cannot stop it. It's just like any other part of human culture."

"We dismissed one potential problem—that newspapers wouldn't print the term if it won—on the grounds that we shouldn't censor ourselves. And indeed, in the afternoon's voting, santorum did win, but many newspapers simply skipped this category in their coverage. So much for academic freedom."

"When you have investment companies losing billions of dollars over something like bundled subprime loans, then you have to consider whether it's important. You probably also want to think about paying off that third mortgage."

"Yeah, that was a surprise to me. I thought it might be something like texting or blog, but people decided that Google - and the argument from the floor from one of our members was that a lot of people blog, millions of people blog, but everybody googles, young and old. It's so generic that people go to Yahoo and google. So, it's google with a lower-case G."

"It's a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement. The movement itself was powered by the word."

"Systematic American dialect research began with the formation of the American Dialect Society in 1889."

"Since 1990, the American Dialect Society has included in its annual meeting a vote on Words of the Year, the words that were most notable, prominent, and characteristic of the discourse of the year just past."

"The American Dialect Society was founded in 1889 with the goal of compiling a dialect dictionary of the United States."

"The initial hope of the American Dialect Society was to provide a body of data from which a dialect dictionary or series of linguistic maps might be derived."

"Since 1889, dialectologists in English-speaking North America have affiliated themselves with the American Dialect Society, an association which in its first constitution defined its object as "the investigation of the spoken English of the United States and Canada, and incidentally of other non-aboriginal dialects spoken in the same countries.""

"Flexitarian was voted Most Useful Word in 2003 by the American Dialect Society, a fact widely publicized in the press."

"Members of the American Dialect Society (www.americandialect.org) study English language use among people living in North America. They analyze how other languages influence English-speaking North Americans, and how, in turn, North Americans influence speakers of other languages."

"The early work of the American Dialect Society reflects the wide reach and the overlapping linguistic and literary interests centered on language study at the end of the century."

"Serious wordinistas will be waiting for the linguistic Oscars, when the American Dialect Society makes its selection in January."

"While astrophysicists were downgrading the cosmic object we call Pluto, the American Dialect Society, which is more than a century old, was upgrading the status of the word Pluto to a verb, making it their 17th annual 'Word of the Year' for 2006."

"The American Dialect Society (ADS; americandialect.org), identifies the most influential words of the year. For example, ADS members voted tweet as the Word of the Year for 2009 and google as the word of the decade. Ten years earlier, Y2K was the top choice, web was the word of the decade, and jazz was the word of the century."

"Disparity of treatment between Hinduism and other Faiths in these textbooks is the key issue here."

"There is an incessant and even anachronistic dwelling on the negatives of Hinduism, which seems to have been singled out as a religion for unfair treatment, when one reads the contrasting more balanced, even glowing narratives about Abrahamic faiths (Islam, Christianity and Judaism) in these and corresponding texts from other grades. Hindu sacred narratives are referred to as stories or myths, whereas Biblical and Koranic narratives are presented as historical facts. Most textbooks also describe the subtle Karma and rebirth related principles of Indic faiths in a minimal and essentially caricaturist manner (“according to this theory, if you do bad deeds, you will be reborn as an insect”)."

"A Muslim or a Christian person is termed a religious fundamentalist if he or she participates in initiatives that advocate or incorporate subversive physical violence or verbal threats. Hindus have it much easier, as demonstrated by the California textbook controversy. All that is required for a Hindu to earn the label “Hindutvawadi “ … is to raise her hand in defense of what she knows and say “Yes, but…”"

"The structure of American pluralism and the nature of the Hindu traditions give rise to two options. These options present themselves as routes that can be traveled by the NRI community in the coming years. On the one hand, the pagan traditions of India could renounce their true nature and transform themselves into variants of biblical religion. Then they will soon fit in as well in the American model of pluralism as the Jews and Muslims. On the other hand, these pagan traditions can remain true to their nature and explicitly represent themselves as completely different from the religions of the book. Then they will turn into a major challenge to American pluralism: the very structure of this model will require rethinking in order to accommodate the Hindu traditions. Currently, the NRI community is succumbing to the first option. It has accepted the American model of pluralism as the structure to which it should adapt itself. This could be seen very clearly in the California textbook controversy. A limited number of foundations have been appointed (or have appointed themselves) as the representatives of the Hindu traditions in the U.S.: the Hindu American Foundation and the Vedic Foundation are most prominent. These foundations play according to the rules of the notions of church and religion that are intrinsic to American pluralism. They challenge the unfair portrayal of the Hindu traditions in the American educational system. But they do so in a manner which advances the transformation of these traditions into inferior variants of Christianity. They intend to present the true doctrines of Hinduism and do so by making it look respectable to American Protestants. That is, the many devatas are transformed into different ways of worshiping the one true God. Hinduism becomes a proper monotheistic faith. A variety of pagan Indian traditions are excluded because they are embarrassing to the sanitized biblical model of American pluralism. These Hindu foundations have become the representatives of the ‘Hindu church’ in America: they will decide the true nature of the Hindu traditions for the American public. The way they are going, however, they will end up with a secularized variant of the old biblical understanding of the Hindu traditions as false religion."

"Now is the time for the NRI community to choose its leadership carefully. It needs people who are aware of the depth of the problems. Otherwise, it will succumb to the demands of American pluralism. It will waste its energy on irrelevant concerns borrowed from Christianity: ‘Who speaks for Hinduism?’; ‘Who has the authority to represent our religion?’; ‘Should only insiders be allowed to do so?’; ‘What are the true teachings of Hinduism?’ Events like the California textbook controversy indicate that the NRI community is at a crucial juncture: either it will become a driving force behind the rejuvenation of the Indian culture and her traditions; or it will repeat the mistakes of three-hundred years of colonialism. In the last century, we have seen the endpoints of the latter route: a growing fanaticism in Indian society; intellectually superficial movements; the threat of bankruptcy of an entire culture. The other route promises to allow the NRI community to play its role: become a rich and vibrant challenge to American pluralism. Not so that pluralism and tolerance might disappear from the American society but so that a pluralism, worthy of its name and liberated from the biblical straitjacket, might come into existence. Perhaps it is time we explore this route…"

"But on Truschke’s own side, the dividing line between bullies and academics is not so neat. Why stoop to street bullying if you have tenure? It is far more effective, then, to resort to academic bullying. Thus, in their intervention in the California Textbook Affair, where Hindu parents had sought to edit blatantly anti-Hindu passages, the explicitly partisan intervening professors even managed to get themselves recognized as arbiters in the matter. This would have been unthinkable if those bullies had not been established academics. (And this I can say eventhough my criticism of the Hindu parents’ positions exists in cold print.) Her focus on street bullies has the effect of misdirecting the reader’s attention, away from the more consequential phenomenon of academic bullying."

"During the cold part of 2005-2006, the Hindu community in the USA livd in expectation of a school history textbook reform in which Hinduism would get a fairer deal and no longer be reduced to hateful stereotypes. After all, Christian, Jewish and Muslim lobbies were having a decisive say in the portrayal of their own belief systesm, with the irrational or inhumane points whitewashed or kept out of view. ... A CAPEEM spokesman reported that a lot of evidence of the close cooperation between the court-appointed "experts" and anti-Hindu groups including Evangelical Churches and terrorist groups came to light. But that was not enough for CAPEEM to score a courtroom victory regarding the political issue at stake here, viz. the blatant inequality between the Abrahamic religions and Hinduism, which alone gets to suffer a schoolbook description imposed by its declared enemies."

"The current "Black Studies" programs are white studies programs in blackface."

"Despite the determinate role of Marxism in the historical development of Black Studies, it never developed an institutional niche. I argue that the rise of Afrocentricity was made possible by the political repression of Black left-radicalism/Marxism."

"Black professors and militant academicians were hollering at white educational institutions for inclusion and relevancy. None spoke the language nor harnessed the energies of our street soldiers. The only organization that did so was the Black Panther Party - and that was destroyed by a potent combination of forces over three decades ago. Nothing ever replaced it."

"Black studies, simply put, is the systematic study of black people. In this sense black studies differs from academic disciplines which stress white experience by being based on black experiences. Black studies is an examination of the deeper truths of black life. It treats the black experience both as it has unfolded over time and as it is currently manifested. These studies will examine the valid part that black people have played in man's development in society. In so doing, black studies will concentrate on both the distinctiveness of black people from, and their interdependence with, other people. To develop this kind of knowledge, black studies must extend beyond the limits prejudice has placed on knowledge of black people."

"The content of black studies is to be relevant, meaningful, and significant to black people. Black studies is to give insights into the historical and contemporary roles of black people, with the objective of improving life in the black community. It can be assumed that improvement of the black life will be an improvement of the lives of other people as well. ... The model that is being generated here is analogous to that of medical scientist-medical doctor. In short, there will be a closer relationship between the pure and applied roles of science, with a greater stress on application of knowledge."

"Black studies does not adhere to the requirement that black people can be studied only in a larger context. It assumes that black people can be studied on their own terms-that their behavior can be evaluated with respect to the standards and requirements prevalent within the black community, whether or not they are the same as in the white community."

"The militant advocates of black studies fail to recognize that the purpose of the humanities and social sciences is, at the very least, to teach critical methods of thought. But this cannot be achieved in a black studies program whose ideological assumptions are ethnocentric, culturally xenophobic and authoritarian."

"We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in these Colleges; and that the Maintenance of our young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced, that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you, who are wise must know that different Nations different Conceptions of things and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our Ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same as yours. We have some Experience of it. Several of our young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means living in the wood...neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Counselors, they were totally good for nothing. We are, however, not the less oblig'd by your kind Offer, tho' we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful Sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them."

"The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves."

"Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?"

"The assumption is all but universal among those who control our educational policies from the elementary grades to the university that anything that sets bounds to the free unfolding of the temperamental proclivities of the young, to their right of self-expression, as one may say, is outworn prejudice. Discipline, so far as it exists, is not of the humanistic or the religious type, but of the kind that one gets in training for a vocation or a specialty. The standards of a genuinely liberal education, as they have been understood, more or less from the time of Aristotle, are being progressively undermined by the utilitarians and the sentimentalists. If the Baconian-Rousseauistic formula is as unsound in certain of its postulates as I myself believe, we are in danger of witnessing in this country one of the great cultural tragedies of the ages."

"Mass public education is one of the great achievements of the United States. ... The U.S. did pioneer it, but it had purposes. One purpose was to drive independent farmers into the industrial system, to induce them to give up their independence, the rights of free men and women, and to submit themselves to industrial discipline and everything that went along with it, to accept a life of wage slavery. ... Ralph Waldo Emerson discussed the fact that the political leaders of his day ... were calling for popular education. When he thought about why they were doing it, he said their reason is fear. "They say this country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats." In other words, educate them, the right way, to passivity, obedience, acceptance of their fate as right and just, conforming to the new spirit of the age, keep their perspectives narrow, their understanding limited, discourage free, independent thought, frighten them into obedience, because the masters are afraid."

"I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!"

"At the instigation of giant corporations, philanthrocapitalist foundations, and neoliberal governments, has been restructured around corporate-designed testing based on the implementation of robotic common-core standards. This is generating massive databases on the student population, much of which are now being surreptitiously marketed and sold. The and privatization of education is feeding the progressive subordination of children’s needs to the cash nexus of the . [...] Having been reduced to intellectual dungeons, many of the poorest, most racially segregated schools in the United States are mere pipelines for prisons or the military."

"We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people."

"The framers of our Constitution firmly believed that a republican government could not endure without intelligence and education generally diffused among the people. The Father of his Country, in his Farewell Address, uses this language: Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened."

"I would therefore call upon Congress to take all the means within their constitutional powers to promote and encourage popular education throughout the country, and upon the people everywhere to see to it that all who possess and exercise political rights shall have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge which will make their share in the Government a blessing and not a danger. By such means only can the benefits contemplated by this amendment to the Constitution be secured."

"The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason’s and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on one sight, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other. Now in this centennial year of our national existence, I believe it a good time to begin the work of strengthening the foundation of the house commenced by our patriotic forefathers one hundred years ago, at Concord and Lexington."

"Encourage free schools, and resolve that not one dollar of money shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school. Resolve that neither the state nor nation, or both combined, shall support institutions of learning other than those sufficient to afford every child growing up in the land the opportunity of a good common school education, unmixed with sectarian, Pagan, or Atheistical tenets. Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separate. With these safeguards, I believe the battles which created the Army of the Tennessee will not have been fought in vain."

"As the primary step, therefore, to our advancement in all that has marked our progress in the past century, I suggest for your earnest consideration, and most earnestly recommend it, that a constitutional amendment be submitted to the legislatures of the several States for ratification, making it the duty of each of the several States to establish and forever maintain free public schools adequate to the education of all the children in the rudimentary branches within their respective limits, irrespective of sex, color, birthplace, or religions; forbidding the teaching in said schools of religious, atheistic, or pagan tenets; and prohibiting the granting of any school funds or school taxes, or any part thereof, either by legislative, municipal, or other authority, for the benefit or in aid, directly or indirectly, of any religious sect or denomination, or in aid or for the benefit of any other object of any nature or kind whatever."

"The United States ... celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs."

"Rutgers, like most American universities, operates as a corporation. Senior administrators, who often have a Master of Business Administration degree (MBA) with little or no experience in higher education, along with sports coaches who have the potential to earn the university money, are highly compensated while thousands of poorly paid educators and staff are denied job security and benefits. Adjunct faculty and graduate workers are often forced to apply for Medicaid. They frequently take second jobs teaching at other colleges, driving for Uber or Lyft, working as cashiers, delivering food for Grubhub or DoorDash, walking dogs, house sitting, waiting on tables, bartending and living four or six to an apartment or camping out on a friend’s sofa. This inversion of values is destroying the nation’s educational system."

"The nation’s universities have been deformed into playgrounds for billionaire hedge fund managers and corporate donors. Harvard University will rename its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after the billionaire hedge fund executive and right-wing Republican donor Kenneth Griffin in honor of his $300 million donation. A decade ago, Harvard renamed the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research after Glenn Hutchins, a private equity oligarch who donated $15 million to the institute. Harvard, to save face, said the famed Du Bois Institute was subsumed into the new entity, but the fact that Du Bois, one of America’s greatest scholars and intellectuals, would have his name replaced by a white equity mogul, lays bare the priorities of Harvard and most colleges and universities."

"The public defunding of universities, along with their seizure by corporations and the uber rich, is part of the slow-motion corporate coup d’état. The goal is to enforce conformity and obedience, to train young people to fill their slots in the corporate machine and leave unquestioned the status quo. The accumulation of vast wealth, no matter how nefarious, is prized as the highest good. Those who mold, shape, inspire and educate the young are neglected. Rutgers, like most large universities, pours resources into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) programs that “Corporate America” values. The fundamental aim of an education, to teach people how to think critically, to grasp and understand the systems of power that dominate our lives, to foster the common good, to construct a life of meaning and purpose, are sidelined, especially with the withering away of the humanities."

"The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence. In the United States the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. Everybody there adopts great numbers of theories, on philosophy, morals, and politics, without inquiry, upon public trust; and if we examine it very closely, it will be perceived that religion itself holds sway there much less as a doctrine of revelation than as a commonly received opinion."

"A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There your children's lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal. Today, 8 million adult Americans, more than the entire population of Michigan, have not finished 5 years of school. Nearly 20 million have not finished 8 years of school. Nearly 54 million -- more than one quarter of all America -- have not even finished high school. Each year more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proved ability, do not enter college because they cannot afford it. And if we cannot educate today's youth, what will we do in 1970 when elementary school enrollment will be 5 million greater than 1960? And high school enrollment will rise by 5 million. And college enrollment will increase by more than 3 million. In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. Most of our qualified teachers are underpaid and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. So we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty. But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation."

"Every child must be encouraged to get as much education as he has the ability to take. We want this not only for his sake—but for the nation's sake. Nothing matters more to the future of our country: not military preparedness—for armed might is worthless if we lack the brain power to build a world of peace; not our productive economy—for we cannot sustain growth without trained manpower; not our democratic system of government—for freedom is fragile if citizens are ignorant."

"Transforming hereditary privilege into ‘merit,’ the existing system of educational selection, with the Big Three [Harvard, Princeton, and Yale] as its capstone, provides the appearance if not the substance of equality of opportunity. In so doing, it legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability over the prerogatives of birth. The problem with a ‘meritocracy,’ then, is not only that its ideals are routinely violated (though that is true), but also that it veils the power relations beneath it. For the definition of ‘merit,’ including the one that now prevails in America’s leading universities, always bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society. Those who are able to define ‘merit’ will almost invariably possess more of it, and those with greater resources—cultural, economic and social—will generally be able to ensure that the educational system will deem their children more meritorious."

"Education is the first step to empowerment. We need to see the power of our contributions to feel more inside ourselves, more inside our bodies, more inside our culture. And now [after the experience of putting together “Latin History for Morons”] I feel like we Latinx people created America."

"You see all these white heroes, everybody is white, all the literature classes—your Shakespeare, your poetry — everybody’s white, and you start to feel less than."

"There was a little bit of improvement in my son’s education, but Latin American and black contributions—and I don’t mean to lump us together—were nonexistent in my public school. Even when I went to college, there was nothing. When I was studying the Civil War, there was nothing about everything we did, not one mention of any participation or contribution, ever. And it would’ve changed my life."

"I started to think why people feel comfortable disrespecting us in a way that’s just not normal or natural. And I started to think that it's because our contributions aren't in history textbooks."

"Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in. That every man may receive at least a moderate education, and thereby be enabled to read the histories of his own and other countries, by which he may duly appreciate the value of our free institutions, appears to be an object of vital importance, even on this account alone, to say nothing of the advantages and satisfaction to be derived from all being able to read the Scriptures, and other works both of a religious and moral nature, for themselves."

"But it was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled."

"A fourth reason offered by British observers to explain American economic efficiency was an educational system that had produced widespread literacy and "adaptative versatility" among American workers. By contrast a British workman trained by long apprenticeship "in the trade" rather than in schools lacked "the ductility of mind and the readiness of apprehension for a new thing" and was "unwilling to change the methods which he has been used to," according to an English manufacturer. The craft apprenticeship system was breaking down in the United States, where most children in the Northeast went to school until age fourteen or fifteen. "Educated up to a far higher standard than those of a much superior social grade in the Old World . . . every [American] workman seems to be continually devising some new thing to assist him in his work, and there is a strong desire . . . to be 'posted up' in every new improvement.""

"Case and Deaton’s findings also suggest that, at least in one crucial respect, America’s educational divide now surpasses the gap that has historically been most significant: race. As recently as 1990, race still trumped educational status as a determinant of life span in the United States. White Americans without a four-year college degree could expect to live longer than Black Americans with one. This has changed. The adult life expectancy of Black Americans with a bachelor’s degree has increased markedly over the past three decades. As a result, they can now expect to live much longer than whites without a bachelor’s degree: “Black men and women with a BA, who used to have fewer expected years from 25 to 75 than White people without a BA, now have more expected years,” Case and Deaton write. “As a result, Black people with a BA are currently closer to White people with a BA than to Black people without a BA, in sharp contrast to the situation in 1990.”"

"A natural question to ask about these findings is what drives this dramatic divergence in the outcomes between the most educated Americans and everybody else. According to one theory, Americans who go to college acquire skills that allow them to excel in a range of professions; the rewards of a degree might reflect their greater ability to contribute to public life and our collective prosperity. According to another theory, important traits such as the capacity to avoid self-destructive behaviors have a strong bearing both on whether somebody gains a college degree and on whether they’re able to live a healthy and successful life. In this case, the difference between these two groups might be mostly “compositional” in nature, simply reflecting the fact that different kinds of people are likely to end up in each group. Case and Deaton, who prefer describing trends to explaining their causes, caution that scholars have yet to come up with a definitive answer to this question. But they mistrust explanations that rationalize the chasm between Americans with and Americans without a college degree as an accurate reflection of each group’s respective choices or skill sets. “We have increasingly come to believe,” they conclude in their new paper, that a college degree “works through often arbitrary assignation of status, so that jobs are allocated, not by matching necessary or useful skills, but by the use of the BA as screen.” In an email to me, Deaton was more blunt: Both he and Case believe that the college degree is most important as “a route to social standing.”"

"Now, already some have protested that there must be no reduction in aid to schools. Well, let me point out that Federal aid to education amounts to only 8 percent of the total educational funding, and for this 8 percent, the Federal Government has insisted on tremendously disproportionate share of control over our schools. Whatever reductions we've proposed in that 8 percent will amount to very little in the total cost of education. They will, however, restore more authority to States and local school districts."

"I also desire to encourage and foster an appreciation of the advantages which I implicitly believe will result from the union of the English-speaking peoples throughout the world and to encourage in the students from the United States of North America[,] who will benefit from the American Scholarships to be established for the reason above given at the University of Oxford under this my Will[,] an attachment to the country from which they have sprung but without I hope withdrawing them or their sympathies from the land of their adoption or birth."

"Education through Washington, D.C. I don't want that. I want local education. I want the parents, and I want all of the teachers, and I want everybody to get together around a school and to make education great. And it was very interesting, I was with Dr. Ben Carson today, who is endorsing me, by the way, tomorrow morning, and he is... [applause] We were talking. We spoke for over an hour on education. And he has such a great handle on it. He wants competitive schools. He wants a lot of different things that are terrific, including charter schools, by the way, that the unions are fighting like crazy. But charter schools work and they work very well. So there are a lot of things. But I'm going to have Ben very involved with education, something that's an expertise of his."

"There can be no doubt that in today’s world a thorough and comprehensive education is an absolute necessity. Yet it is obvious from the data that a not even minimum education is being received in most ghetto schools. White decision-makers have been running those schools with injustice, indifference and inadequacy for too long; the result has been an educationally crippled black child turned out onto the labor market equipped to do little more than stand in welfare lines to receive his miserable dole."

"Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education."

"The American Negro Academy believes that upon those of the race who have had the advantage of higher education and culture, rests the responsibility of taking concerted steps for the employment of these agencies to uplift the race to higher planes of thought and action"

"During the last two decades of the nineteenth century black Americans experienced a relentless attack on their social, political, and economic rights. This resulted in a decline the their status throughout the United States and especially in the South, where slightly less than 90 percent of them lived. Beginning in 1890, measures designed to disfranchise blacks began to be written into the constitutions of southern states; and, by 1910, most blacks had been eliminated as voters. It was in this same period that racial segregation, or Jim Crow ideas, began to be translated into law and steadily extended to all areas of life in the South."

"By the mid-1880s blacks of all classes, in the North as well as the South, were coming to feel that the intense and implacable hostility of whites left them no alternative but to accept a separate existence apart from the larger American community. Many continued to protest and agitate for all their rights as citizens, but the impossibility of halting their exclusion had to be acknowledged. Confronted with this situation black Americans began to pour their energies into the creation of cultural, welfare, religious, educational, economic, and social institutions that would be counterparts to the ones from which whites barred them."

"Americans raised in poor families do markedly less well compared to those from middle class or affluent homes—and it doesn’t matter whether you choose college attendance, employment rates, or future household income as your measure. And the longer they live in poverty the worse the odds that they’ll escape it in adulthood; for one thing, they’re far less likely to finish high school or attend college than their more fortunate peers."

"Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion. Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer."

"What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially. We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform. Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families. Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing."

"The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves."

"[R]ising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting. High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich."

"We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it. Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile."

"We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. [...] The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy."