Educators From The United States

"In 75 percent of the television programs shown during hours when American children are most likely to be watching, the hero either kills people or beats them up. This violence typically constitutes the "climax" of the show. Viewers, having been taught that bad guys deserve to be punished, take pleasure in watching this violence."

"Had we been raised speaking a language that facilitated the expression of compassion, we would have learned to articulate our needs and values directly, rather than to insinuate wrongness when they have not been met."

"Most of us grew up speaking a language that encourages us to label, compare, demand, and pronounce judgements rather than to be aware of what we are feeling and needing."

"For the first seven years that I worked full-time as an adult, I had no legal right to a credit card, , or other line of credit. Although no law barred unmarried women from obtaining credit, banks and other lending institutions could, and often did, reject our applications without even pretending that it was for some other reason. It wasn't until 1974 that the banned discrimination on the basis of marital status. Back then, that legislation was viewed as a matter of gender equity because credit had not been widely denied to unmarried men and because the new law also prohibited lending institutions from requiring married women to have their husbands' permission to obtain credit. If you've read or seen Margaret Atwood's , you may recall that the government subjugated women by preventing them from having access to money independent of men. That wasn't fantasy or imagination on Atwood's part. It was memory."

"In more than three decades as an , I have seen the faculty express unwillingness to deal with pain-in-the-neck academic activities, such as repetitive low-level advising, course scheduling, fund-raising, alumni services, the running of some programs, and the preparation of dossiers and other reports. Over time, staff were hired to fill these roles, and — surprise! — started to make decisions and generally to run the place."

"A few years ago, I taught a summer course in literary classics for high school English teachers. When the class began talking about Romeo and Juliet, two of the teachers had trouble following what the others were saying. These two teachers were using high school literature anthologies; the rest of the class had read paperback versions of Romeo and Juliet. We compared the high school anthologies with the paperbacks and found more than three hundred lines missing from the play in each anthology. Neither textbook mentioned that its presentation of Romeo and Juliet was definitely not Shakespeare's. In the anthologies, lines containing sexual material—even such mild words as bosom and maidenhood—were missing. Removing most of the love story shortened Romeo and Juliet considerably, but the publishers did not stop there; they also took out material that had nothing to do with sex. Both anthologies, for example, omitted Romeo's lines,"

"I have found that this speech is routinely removed from high school anthologies because it associates religion with falsehood and violence, thus offending people who demand that religion must always be presented favorably."

"is an impatient industry, especially when Wall Street is involved. Healthcare professionals must be sure that aggressive strategies to cut costs and enhance short-term profits do not harm patients. We face special challenges when new policies are implemented abruptly. For example, a managed care company in Wisconsin gave hospitals less than 2 months’ notice in 1994 that they would routinely authorize just 5 days of hospitalization for patients undergoing CABG despite the fact that fewer than 9% of patients in the state were achieving this target at the time."

"Because equity ultimately is related to the distribution of power, a quality mathematics education also must include a focus on “critical” and “community” perspectives on mathematics that acknowledge the human activity of mathematics—that it is constantly being (re)made by people in negotiation with each other and their surroundings. Although this broader view of mathematics is gaining ground, most researchers/educators continue to frame equity from a deficit perspective—we need to get more people of differing walks of life to do mathematics so that they can reap the social and economic benefits of participating in society, not because their participation will somehow change the nature of mathematics as a discipline or our relationship with (each other on) this planet. Yet, until we are able to see that mathematics needs people as much as people need mathematics, we risk tinkering with education in a way that fails to address power issues or true transformation in society."

"The history of medicine serves several useful functions today, when doctors and the American health care system confront many challenges. Physicians live and work in an era of escalating expectations, eroding autonomy, and decreasing discretionary time. There is so much—far too much—to know, to learn, and to do. Understandably, many doctors are concerned about the future of medicine as they watch so many powerful political, economic, and social forces transform medical practice, research, and education. In this context, the history of medicine provides useful perspective and teaches valuable lessons. Just as a helps us assess the significance of their symptoms and develop a diagnostic and therapeutic strategy, the history of medicine provides important perspective on present and future challenges and opportunities. ... History also teaches humility. I could cite many examples that apply to institutions, organizations, nations, and entire cultures, but I will focus on humility at the level of the individual. The aphorism “fame is fleeting” applies to medicine, as it does to any other area of human endeavor. Almost all of the most influential physicians and medical scientists of earlier generations are now forgotten. ..."

"Why is a book that weaves together histories of heart care, a celebrated medical center, and specialization important? And why should it interest general readers as well as health care professionals, historians, social scientists, and policymakers? First of all, most individuals living in industrial countries have or will develop cardiovascular disease during their lifetimes. And most of them have already seen coronary heart disease alter or end the lives of family members and friends. Despite astonishing developments in diagnosis and treatment in recent decades, cardiovascular disease still kills more Americans than any other cause. Its economic implications are staggering. In the United States alone, medical costs and productivity losses related to cardiovascular disease are approaching $500 billion annually. ... Second, the Mayo Clinic is the world's oldest and largest multispeciality group practice. There is value in understanding why this institution has been a national leader in health care since the early twentieth century. ... Specialization is the book's third major topic. I agree with historian 's assertion that "specialization is the fundamental theme for the organization of medicine in the twentieth century." ..."

"In early 2014, the Department of Justice and Education issued guidelines pressuring public school districts to adopt racial quotas when disciplining children. The basis for this guidance was studies showing that black children were over three times more likely to face serious punishment--suspension or expulsion--for misbehaving at school. The government concluded that school districts were engaging in massive illegal discrimination against black students. In fact, however, the government had no basis for its conclusion. The Supreme Court has explicitly stated that racial disparities in punishment do not by themselves prove discrimination, as they may just be consistent with the underlying rates of misbehavior by each group. There are no valid statistics (and the government hasn't cited any) from which one can infer that black students and white students would be expected to engage in serious misbehavior in school at the same rate. Unless there is some reason to expect kids to behave completely differently at school than outside of it, the school discipline figures are in line with what one would expect. African-American minors are arrested outside of school for violent crime at a rate approximately 3.5 times their share of the population. Moreover, as former Department of Education attorney Hans Bader notes, the government's own statistics show that white boys were over two times as likely to be suspended as their peers of Asian descent. By the government's logic, this means, absurdly, that school districts must be discriminating against white students and in favor of Asians. As of this writing, Minneapolis education authorities have announced their intention to end the black/white gap in suspensions and expulsions, a plan that struck many observers as announcing the imposition of quotas on school discipline."

"[T]he Constitution was built for deliberation, not for speed. The Founding Fathers sought to create a system of checks and balances that prevents any branch of government from becoming tyrannical. The rise of czars threatens that goal. Hopefully, the political problems the czars caused President Obama mean that the American czar system will share the fate of the Russian one."

"A college student who wants to file a complaint of sexual assault within the campus disciplinary system informs a university employee such as an assistant dean for student life, or perhaps the Title IX coordinator. That person eventually forwards the complaint to a university disciplinary panel that may be composed of, for example, an associate dean with a master's degree in English literature, a professor of chemistry, and a senior majoring in anthropology. Unlike criminal prosecutors, members of the disciplinary panels do not have access to subpoena powers or to crime labs. They often have no experience in fact-finding, arbitration, conflict resolution, or any other relevant skill set. There is, to put it mildly, little reason to expect such panels to have the experience, expertise, and resources necessary to adjudicate a contested claim of sexual assault. Making matters worse, most campus tribunals ban attorneys for the parties (even in an advisory capacity), rules of procedure and evidence are typically ad hoc, and no one can consult precedents because records of previous disputes are sealed due to privacy considerations. Campus "courts" therefore have an inherently kangoorish nature. Even trained police officers and prosecutors too often mishandle sexual assault cases, so it's not surprising that the amateurs running the show at universities tend to have a poor record. And indeed, some victims' advocacy groups, such as the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), oppose having the government further encourage the campus judicial system to primarily handle campus sexual assault claims, because that means not treating rape as a serious crime. A logical solution, if federal intervention is indeed necessary, would be for OCR [US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights] to mandate that universities encourage students who complain of sexual assault to report the assault immediately to the police, and that universities develop procedures to cooperate with police investigations. Concerns about victims' well-being when prosecutors decline to pursue a case could also be adjudicated in a real court, as a student could seek a civil protective order against her alleged assailant. OCR could have mandated or encouraged universities to cooperate with those civil proceedings, which in some cases might warrant excluding an alleged assailant from campus."

"In an article of 1966, "The Decline of the Harappans", G. R. Dales, director of archeological fieldwork in South Asia, particularly in West Pakistan, for a good number of years, wrote in connection with the topic of an Aryan invasion of India: "The Aryans ... have not yet been identified archaologically.""

"Researchers discovered that for a given cohort of law school graduates, there was a massive disparity between those who listed themselves as Native American lawyers on the census (228) and the number of self-identified Native Americans who graduated law school over that same time period (2,610). In other words, over ten times as many people claimed to be Native American when they applied to law school than identified themselves as Native American lawyers once they graduated."

"OCR [US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights] also states that a "school should also ensure that hearings are conducted in a manner that does not inflict additional trauma on the complainant", which implies that the school should not start the proceedings with a presumption of innocence, or even a stance of neutrality. Rather, university officials should assume that any complaint is valid and the accused is guilty as charged."

"Where are the burned fortresses, the arrow heads, weapons, pieces of armour, the smashed chariots and bodies of the invaders and defenders?... Despite the extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan invasion."

"…we cannot even establish a definite correlation between the end of the Indus civilization and the Aryan invasion. But even if we could, what is the material evidence to substantiate the supposed invasion and massacre? Where are the burned fortresses, the arrowheads, weapons, pieces of armor, the smashed chariots and bodies of the invaders and defenders? Despite extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of Aryan invasion. It is interesting that Sir John Marshall himself, the Director of the Mohenjo-daro excavations that first revealed the "massacre" remains separated the end of the Indus civilization from the time of the Aryan invasion by two centuries. He attributed the slayings to bandits from the hills of west of the Indus, who carried out sporadic raids on an already tired, decaying, and defenseless civilization. The contemporaneity of the skeletal remains is anything but certain. Whereas a couple of them definitely seem to represent a slaughter, in situ, the bulk of the bones were found in contexts suggesting burials of sloppiest and most irreverent nature. There is no destruction level covering the latest period of the city, no sign of extensive burning, no bodies of warriors clad in armor and surrounded by weapons of war. The citadel, the only fortified part of the city, yielded no evidence of a final defence. …..Indra and the barbarian hordes are exonerated."

"But it was shabby archaeology: U.S. archaeologist George P. Dales proved in 1964 that the owners of The said skeletons had lived in different periods; moreover, neither weapons nor any signs of war were found at the supposed sites of the “mythical massacre,” as he called it: “Despite the extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan invasion.”"

"No one has any exact knowledge of the date when the Aryans first entered the Indus Valley area; they have not yet been identified archaeologically."

"There is no destruction level covering the latest period of the city, no sign of extensive burning, no bodies of warriors clad in armor and surrounded by the weapons of war … Despite the extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan invasion. (Dales, 1964: 43, 38)"

"Where are the burned fortresses, the arrow heads, weapons, pieces of armor, the smashed chariots, and bodies of the invaders and defenders."

"[P]olitical speech does not lose First Amendment protection "simply because its source is a corporation". Otherwise, there would be nothing in the Constitution stopping the government from shutting down any newspaper, movie company, television station, or website that organized itself as a corporation."

"Some former Bush officials, however, believed that the Justice Department's failure to pursue the New Black Panther Party case resulted from top Obama administration officials' ideological belief that civil rights laws only apply to protect members of minority groups from discrimination by whites. Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler denied any such motives. She asserted that "the department makes enforcement decisions based on the merits, not the race, gender or ethnicity of any party involved". But an anonymous Justice Department official told the Washington Post that "the Voting Rights Act was passed because people like Bull Connor [a white police commissioner] were hitting people like John Lewis [a black civil rights activist], not the other way around". The Post concluded that the New Black Panther Party case "tapped into deep divisions within the Justice Department that persist today over whether the agency should focus on protecting historically oppressed minorities or enforce laws without regard to race". The Office of Professional Responsibility's report on the case found that several former and current DOJ attorneys told investigators under oath that some lawyers in the Civil Rights Division don't believe that the DOJ should bring cases involving white victims of racial discrimination. The report also found that Voting Section lawyers believed that their boss, appointed by President Obama, wanted them to bring only cases protecting members of American minority groups. She phrased this as having the section pursue only "traditional" civil rights enforcement cases. Her employees understood that by "traditional" she meant only cases involving minority victims."

"Pooling people in race silos is akin to zoologists grouping raccoons, tigers, and okapis on the basis that they are all stripey."

"“Indra and the barbarian hordes are exonerated” (Dales 1964: 43)"

"I am proud of who we are and excited about our potential. However, life has many chapters. While each provides a chance to help our fellow Kentuckians, they must all come to an end. I am ready to close this chapter and begin another that includes spending more time with my family and tackling new challenges for our region."

"Did you know that a Jewish woman has less cancer of the cervix than any other race in this country or this world?” Bentley asked. “And why is that? Because the Jewish women only have one sex partner… They don't have multiple sex partners. To say that the Jewish people approve of this drug now is wrong."

"Ian got up and looked around. Sicker than the stories themselves was the way they were told, full of verve and energy—as if it actually mattered. He hated to hear gamers spilling their guts, trying to sound bad. All it showed was how totally delusional they were. The most elemental rule of gaming was that if you die, you lose—your original stake is gone. You have to give up, or buy your way back in. This tough talk amounted to a bunch of chronic losers bucking themselves up by boasting about how badly they had lost. Somehow he had to win."

"A man makes his mark as much by the quality of his enemies as by the quality of his friends."

"The king is free to call his greed taxation, and his misdeeds justice."

"Nothing beats going to bed dead and waking up alive."

"He is a Nevada senator, a pimp, and a railroad lawyer; all three professions having much the same qualifications. He is also a saloonkeeper, but no man in Nevada is anything unless he is also a saloonkeeper."

"“Gambling houses stay in business by making it pleasant, even exciting, to lose,” said Aaron. “They treat the loser like a king, providing him with food and drink in a luxurious setting, allowing women of easy virtue to rub up against him. They will ply the loser with every pleasure known to men so he may give up his money and come back when he has more. Most gamblers lose. Not one in twenty has a bank account. Some play poker like assassins, and throw their winnings away on the ponies. Winning takes hard work and strict accounting. Losing is open to all. That is the secret of losing.”"

"Staring into the face of a corpse is sure to make one question where life is headed."

"Dieter had the true Gypsy contempt for governments, plunging their people into one holocaust after another, calling each new disaster leadership. Or statescraft."

"“Why are they shooting at us?” The older man stared at her. Kurt answered evenly, “That is what every soldier wants to know—I suppose it is because we are shooting at them.”"

"“This isn’t fair.” “Hell, no! It’s democracy.”"

"Smack, crack, crank, speed, booze, acid, has, bhang, poppies, and belladonna; none of the above (or all of them taken at once) had even half the addictive power of gaming."

"“This is not possible. Here in America we have democracy.” “Hell, honey,” said the Irish woman, “this ain’t America, this is San Francisco.”"

"He took her upstairs to Guido’s big tiled shower. “I will show you the greatest luxury of this century—it almost makes up for the two World Wars.” Turning on the hot water, he sprinkled bath herbs on the tiles. The stall filled with scented steam. Slowly, he undressed her. Kathe’s skin was stark white under the electric light, smelling of excitement and caked with dirt; in the whole time they had been together, Kathe had bathed only once, in the cold waters of the Rhine. He positioned her under the hot cascade from the shower nozzle, her bare hips pressed against the hard warm tiles, her feet braced in the corners of the stall. Dieter scrubbed both their bodies with spiced soap—his hands slid down her breasts and between her legs. Kathe realized that the sixteenth century had a lot to discover about sex and cleanliness."

"We tend to view history not as it was, but as we think it should have been."

"A single truth well-told did the work of a dozen lies."

"Unfortunately systemic racism seems to ripple through our social institutions and into our daily social interactions, whether in Congress or at a coffee shop down the street from the Capitol. [...] Systemically, we know that Black people compared to whites are more likely to attend schools with less funding per student, less likely to obtain a job because of our “Black-sounding” name or even when attending an Ivy League university, less likely to obtain a home loan (even when having the same credit score), have their homes appraised for equitable value, more likely to experience pregnancy complications and maternal mortality, and more likely to have contact with police and the criminal justice system. Systemic racism inhibits (rather than prohibits like in the past) people’s ability to actualize all aspects of the American Dream. This occurs even for highly-educated Black people with high incomes and no criminal record. In fact, research documents that white people with a criminal record are more likely to get called back for a job than Black people without one."

"Systemic racism is not simply a thing of the past. It is up close and personal in the present. Racism may be no more transparent in an institution with the least representative racial progress like the Senate. There have only been 11 Black senators in roughly 232 years. Clearly, the Senate is the exact space we need people with the courage to say the blunt, honest truth about our nation’s past and present. Only then can we actualize a future where systemic racism does not exist. It is imperative for a truth, reconciliation, and reparative process to commence. This starts with atoning for the enslavement of millions of Africans whose descendants continuously fall systemically behind, whether they end up being the lone Black Republican senator or a Black police officer who might have the power to pull him over. We must have the courage to speak truth to power and one of the places it starts is in Congress. “If not now, then when?”"

"The world, our world, finds itself caught between a rock and hard place. The relationship that we humans have developed with fossil energy over the last 250 years is a textbook definition of an addiction, and increasingly looks like a Faustian pact: we know that it’s slowly killing us, we know we should be leaving it in the ground and we also know that we will someday have to live without it anyway, yet we just can’t stop burning it and we can’t get enough of it, because we have multiplied our numbers and built our whole world around it. The detox “replacement medications” that we are using do not seem to be working so far, even as we keep increasing their doses. We are of course “pledging” to try harder and harder in the future, yet we keep relapsing into our fossil addiction, year after year, day after day, one flight at a time, one car ride at a time, one purchase at a time, one degree of comfort or of convenience at a time. By doing so we keep turning our eyes and minds away from the real nature of the upcoming and inevitable “energy transition”, the only one that is in fact likely to happen in our lifetimes, and which as Richard Heinberg said will almost certainly be a transition “from using a lot to using a lot less”."

"Life may be unique to Earth. Even if single-celled organisms can readily evolve in conditions that exist on millions or billions of other planets, we have no actual evidence that complex, multi-cellular life exists anywhere else in the vastness of space. Bacteria appeared on our planet roughly 3.7 billion years ago; by 2 billion years ago, the tree of life was branching into what would become a stunning web of creatures, huge and tiny. Plants, animals, and fungi proliferated, formed relationships, and produced ecosystems. The result was a planet full of life, and one whose atmosphere, temperature, chemical composition, and weather are all largely shaped by the side effects of the strategies that organisms use to thrive. However, in a matter of mere centuries, we humans are unraveling the web of life and triggering a mass extinction event that is likely to impact virtually all species on the Earth, and to destabilize the fundamental planetary systems upon which we too depend. Mass extinctions have happened before. The web of life is, paradoxically, both resilient and fragile. On five previous occasions (most recently the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction 65 million years ago) our world lost up to 95 percent of its species. The current wave of extinctions that’s being triggered by humans is, so far, not on the same scale, but it is proceeding far more rapidly than previous ones. We humans represent a new kind of threat to the rest of life: our development of language, tool-making, and fire-spreading rendered us hyper-effective hunters and foragers. Tens of thousands of years ago, we were already reshaping landscapes and impacting wildlife. Our ability to expand our own habitat has generated unwanted results: some prey animals were hunted to extinction, and in a process of competitive exclusion, humans caused many local extirpations by appropriating the resources of habitats for themselves. These unintended effects then impacted humans themselves, often by compromising their food supply. Therefore, over time, humans who stayed in any given ecosystem long enough to learn its limits embraced cultural traditions to moderate their demands on it. However, since the start of the European conquest of most of the rest of the world, and especially since society’s rapid adoption of fossil fuels starting around 1800, human impact on the biosphere has accelerated at a breathtaking pace. Expanding human populations and associated land use changes, industrial agriculture, industrial forestry, industrial-scale fishing, proliferation of toxic chemicals, and climate change are decimating native species of plants and animals around the world. According to some estimates, populations of many non-domesticated species have declined, on average, by 70 percent, and the pace of species extinctions has quickened to 100 or more times the usual or “background” rate. What will the world come to look like if these trends continue? In one scenario, Earth will have become fully domesticated in a century or two, so that humans and machines control planetary systems (including climate patterns, ocean currents, the water cycle, and the carbon cycle). In this possible case, very little of wild nature will be left. In the far more likely scenario, the unraveling of the web of life and the destabilization of planetary systems will lead to the collapse not just of biodiversity but civilization as well. Is it too late to save biodiversity and the living Earth? … I’ll argue that only a collective effort to put wild nature at the center of our priorities will prevent its devastation and the possible disappearance of our own species, among countless others."

"Climate change is a wicked problem… [and] there is no way to solve it without sacrificing something that society currently holds dear, and without thereby generating more problems. For example, shrinking the economy would reduce carbon emissions, but it would throw a lot of people out of work (in effect, we did trial runs during the financial crash of 2008 and the COVID pandemic of 2020; both times, carbon emissions plunged, yet everyone was eager to “get back to normal”). Building vast amounts of low-carbon energy-producing and energy-using infrastructure would also reduce emissions, but that would require tens of trillions of dollars of investment as well as enormous quantities of depleting, non-renewable minerals—the mining of which would generate pollution and destroy wildlife habitat."

"Intelligence is useful and entertaining. Companies go out of their way to hire applicants with high IQ scores, and spectacular intellectual achievements in the arts and sciences can win the hero-worship of generations ([like] Aristotle, Bach, Einstein). Measuring smarts is the job of an industry. Indeed, smartness is so endlessly praised in modern society that questioning its value may constitute one of the most dissident of human acts. High intelligence has been defined in many ways, but typically as the capacity for abstraction, logic, self-awareness, learning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. High intelligence values itself, selects for itself, and fascinates itself. Our remarkable human intellectual achievements are deeply tied to language, whose development occurred as a self-reinforcing evolutionary feedback process. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, early humans derived a collective survival advantage by developing precursors of language, which enabled them to coordinate their behavior and to plan. But language requires extra brain power, so natural selection also worked to increase brain size, which enabled further development of language, which conferred still more survival advantages, and so on. If evolution produced high intelligence, then high intelligence is latent in evolution. Yet high intelligence is quite rare in nature. While all species communicate to some degree, only one has developed abstract, symbolic language. If language-based high intelligence offers survival advantages, why has it cropped up in nature only once?"