Apt School Quotes

Generally in life, knowledge is acquired to be used. But school learning more often fits Freire's apt metaphor: knowledge is treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future.

Thomas looked like he was about to talk some smack at the malk, but only for a second. Then he frowned and said, "It's odd. You sound like...like a grade-school teacher." "Perhaps it is because I am speaking to a child," Cat Sith said. "The comparison is apt." Thomas blinked several times and then he looked at me. "Did the evil kitty just call me a child?

When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word "depression." Depression, most people know, used to be termed "melancholia," a word which appears in English as the year 1303 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be aware of its pathological nuances. "Melancholia" would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a blank tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated -- the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer -- had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.

There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter into our civil affairs, our government soon would be destroyed. Let it once enter our common schools, they would be destroyed. Those who made our Constitution saw this, and used the most apt and comprehensive language in it to prevent such a catastrophe. [Weiss v. District Board, March 18, 1890]

Parents embraced “Sesame Street” for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children’s access to television. “Sesame Street” appeared to justify allowing a four- or five-year-old to sit transfixed in front of a television screen for unnatural periods of time. Parents were eager to hope that television could teach their children something other than which breakfast cereal has the most crackle. At the same time, “Sesame Street” relieved them of the responsibility of teaching their pre-school children how to read—no small matter in a culture where children are apt to be considered a nuisance.... We now know that “Sesame Street” encourages children to love school only if school is like “Sesame Street.” Which is to say, we now know that “Sesame Street” undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents.

Freud was fascinated with depression and focused on the issue that we began with—why is it that most of us can have occasional terrible experiences, feel depressed, and then recover, while a few of us collapse into major depression (melancholia)? In his classic essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud began with what the two have in common. In both cases, he felt, there is the loss of a love object. (In Freudian terms, such an “object” is usually a person, but can also be a goal or an ideal.) In Freud’s formulation, in every loving relationship there is ambivalence, mixed feelings—elements of hatred as well as love. In the case of a small, reactive depression—mourning—you are able to deal with those mixed feelings in a healthy manner: you lose, you grieve, and then you recover. In the case of a major melancholic depression, you have become obsessed with the ambivalence—the simultaneity, the irreconcilable nature of the intense love alongside the intense hatred. Melancholia—a major depression—Freud theorized, is the internal conflict generated by this ambivalence. This can begin to explain the intensity of grief experienced in a major depression. If you are obsessed with the intensely mixed feelings, you grieve doubly after a loss—for your loss of the loved individual and for the loss of any chance now to ever resolve the difficulties. “If only I had said the things I needed to, if only we could have worked things out”—for all of time, you have lost the chance to purge yourself of the ambivalence. For the rest of your life, you will be reaching for the door to let you into a place of pure, unsullied love, and you can never reach that door. It also explains the intensity of the guilt often experienced in major depression. If you truly harbored intense anger toward the person along with love, in the aftermath of your loss there must be some facet of you that is celebrating, alongside the grieving. “He’s gone; that’s terrible but…thank god, I can finally live, I can finally grow up, no more of this or that.” Inevitably, a metaphorical instant later, there must come a paralyzing belief that you have become a horrible monster to feel any sense of relief or pleasure at a time like this. Incapacitating guilt. This theory also explains the tendency of major depressives in such circumstances to, oddly, begin to take on some of the traits of the lost loved/hated one—and not just any traits, but invariably the ones that the survivor found most irritating. Psychodynamically, this is wonderfully logical. By taking on a trait, you are being loyal to your lost, beloved opponent. By picking an irritating trait, you are still trying to convince the world you were right to be irritated—you see how you hate it when I do it; can you imagine what it was like to have to put up with that for years? And by picking a trait that, most of all, you find irritating, you are not only still trying to score points in your argument with the departed, but you are punishing yourself for arguing as well. Out of the Freudian school of thought has come one of the more apt descriptions of depression—“aggression turned inward.” Suddenly the loss of pleasure, the psychomotor retardation, the impulse to suicide all make sense. As do the elevated glucocorticoid levels. This does not describe someone too lethargic to function; it is more like the actual state of a patient in depression, exhausted from the most draining emotional conflict of his or her life—one going on entirely within. If that doesn’t count as psychologically stressful, I don’t know what does.

Hard cases, it has been frequently observed, are apt to introduce bad law.

And if he prove apt I will keep him as prentice, or see to it that he is schooled as fits his gifts. For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing.

I will help--but only so much, only so far. It is not that I believe these children are less than my own. It is not that I believe I do not have a responsibility for them. It is just that in a world of haves and have-nots, I do not want to give up too much of what I have. I do not want to diminish the complexity and diversity of my life. Instead, I will choose to spend another seventy-five dollars on myself rather than send another child to school, and I will choose to do this over and over again. I no longer think of myself as a good person. I have adjusted to that.

Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, more appreciative of what they are getting, and far less entitled and competitive. They tend to act like peers instead of rivals.

At high school I was never comfortable for a minute. I did not know about Lonnie. Before an exam, she got icy hands and palpitations, but I was close to despair at all times. When I was asked a question in class, any simple little question at all, my voice was apt to come out squeaky, or else hoarse and trembling. When I had to go to the blackboard I was sure—even at a time of the month when this could not be true—that I had blood on my skirt. My hands became slippery with sweat when they were required to work the blackboard compass. I could not hit the ball in volleyball; being called upon to perform an action in front of others made all my reflexes come undone. I hated Business Practice because you had to rule pages for an account book, using a straight pen, and when the teacher looked over my shoulder all the delicate lines wobbled and ran together. I hated Science; we perched on stools under harsh lights behind tables of unfamiliar, fragile equipment, and were taught by the principal of the school, a man with a cold, self-relishing voice—he read the Scriptures every morning—and a great talent for inflicting humiliation. I hated English because the boys played bingo at the back of the room while the teacher, a stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front. She threatened them, she begged them, her face red and her voice as unreliable as mine. They offered burlesqued apologies and when she started to read again they took up rapt postures, made swooning faces, crossed their eyes, flung their hands over their hearts. Sometimes she would burst into tears, there was no help for it, she had to run out into the hall. Then the boys made loud mooing noises; our hungry laughter—oh, mine too—pursued her. There was a carnival atmosphere of brutality in the room at such times, scaring weak and suspect people like me.

For those who must deal with human corpses regularly, it is easier (and, I suppose, more accurate) to think of them as objects, not people. For most physicians, objectification is mastered their first year of medical school, in the gross anatomy lab, or “gross lab,” as it is casually and somewhat aptly known. To help depersonalize the human form that students will be expected to sink knives into and eviscerate, anatomy lab personnel often swathe the cadavers in gauze and encourage students to unwrap as they go, part by part.

All children are curious and I wonder by what process this trait becomes developed in some and suppressed in others. I suspect again that schools and colleges help in the suppression insofar as they meet curiosity by giving the answers, rather than by some method that leads from narrower questions to broader questions. It is hard to satisfy the curiosity of a child, and even harder to satisfy the curiosity of a scientist, and methods that meet curiosity with satisfaction are thus not apt to foster the development of the child into the scientist. I don't advocate turning all children into professional scientists, although I think there would be advantages if all adults retained something of the questioning attitude, if their curiosity were less easily satisfied by dogma, of whatever variety.

float before I could swim. Ellis never believed it was called Dead-Man’s Float, thought I’d made it up. I told him it was a survival position after a long exhausting journey. How apt. All I see below is blue light. Peaceful and eternal. I’m holding my breath until my body throbs as one pulse. I roll over and suck in a deep lungful of warm air. I look up at the starry starry night. The sound of water in and out of my ears, and beyond this human shell, the sound of cicadas fills the night. I dreamt of my mother. It was an image, that’s all, and a fleeting one, at that. She was faded with age, like a discarded offcut on the studio floor. In this dream, she didn’t speak, just stepped out of the shadows, a reminder that we are the same, her and me, cut from the same bruised cloth. I understand how she got up one day and left, how instinctively she trusted the compulsion to flee. The rightness of that action. We are the same, her and me. She walked out when I was eight. Never came back. I remember being collected from school by our neighbour Mrs Deakin, who bought me sweets on the way home and let me play with a dog for as long as I wanted. Inside the house, my father was sitting at the table, drinking. He was holding a sheet of blue writing paper covered in black words, and he said, Your mother’s gone. She said she’s sorry. A sheet of writing paper covered in words and just two for me. How was that possible? Her remnant life was put in bags and stored in the spare room at the earliest opportunity. Stuffed in, not folded – clothes brushes, cosmetics all thrown in together, awaiting collection from the Church. My mother had taken only what she could carry. One rainy afternoon, when my father had gone next door to fix a pipe, I emptied the bags on to the floor and saw my mother in every jumper and blouse and skirt I held up. I used to watch her dress and she let me. Sometimes, she asked my opinion about colours or what suited her more, this blouse or that blouse? And she’d follow my advice and tell me how right I was. I took off my clothes and put on a skirt first, then a blouse, a cardigan, and slowly I became her in miniature. She’d taken her good shoes, so I slipped on a pair of mid-height heels many sizes too big, of course, and placed a handbag on my arm. I stood in front of the mirror, and saw the infinite possibilities of play. I strutted, I

It was not until November 25, 1996, that an American academic, Thomas E. Mahl, researching Britain’s various secret service archives, came across the Williams file. He has now published Desperate Deception, as full a story as we are ever apt to get of “British Covert Operations in the United States 1939–44.” Although media and schools condition Americans to start giggling at the mention of the word “conspiracy,” there are, at any moment, all sorts of conspiracies crisscrossing our spacious skies and amber fields of grain, and of them all in this century, the largest, most intricate and finally most successful was that of the British to get us into the Second World War.

You really love him, huh? Not just the sweet ‘oh, we met in high school and just couldn’t seem to find someone else’ sort of love, but the epic, desperate, ‘move mountains and cross oceans’ sort of love.” I chuckled. “I think that would be an apt description. When you realize that someone would do anything for you, even if it means separating themselves from you, risking that you’ll never love them again, just to make sure you’re safe and well . . . There’s no coming back from that. You’ll do whatever it takes to be with them. You might want to kick their ass a few times along the way. But when you find that, you don’t let it go.” Jamie shuddered. “Too mushy?” I asked. “I’ll survive.

When you’re the father of a little boy, which involves many joys, you do have one rationalization in your back pocket that is ready to be used roughly half of the time – that your little boy has the disadvantage of not being a girl. Girls just seem to be ahead of the game in so many ways when they are little; they are not as apt to tumble spontaneously off stools as boys are. We saw this clearly illustrated the first day we took Dean to nursery school: the little girls took off their coats and hung them up, neatly, and then went to help all the little boys, whose coats were half off, or still zippered and hopelessly tangled around their midsections, or attached to one hand and dragging along the floor.

But if the line is drawn farther off, or not drawn at all, then the homosexual must go ever further for the same thrill of transgression. He must invent new methods, new combinations. Not content with merely inserting his organ of generation in the place of evacuation and uncleanness, he has to insert his fist there too—and we are subjected to the absurdity of school officials nodding in their superior wisdom as Mr. Savage explains to teenagers that you really can shape your fist so that it won’t cause intense pain or tear the rectum or do a host of other things that he won’t tell them about, because they involve diseases like hepatitis, and it’s best to hide those things from teenagers who are apt to be squeamish about people sneezing on their lunch, let alone invading their intestines.

While paying attention to the messages in its public spaces, Christianity also wisely recognizes the extent to which our concepts of good and bad are shaped by the people we spend time with. It knows that we are dangerously permeable with regard to our social circle, all too apt to internalize and mimic others’ attitudes and behaviour. Simultaneously, it accepts that the particular company we keep is largely a result of haphazard forces, a peculiar cast of characters drawn from our childhood, schooling, community and work. Among the few hundred people we regularly encounter, not very many are likely to be the sorts of exceptional individuals who exhaust our imagination with their good qualities, who strengthen our soul and whose voices we want consciously to adopt to bolster our best impulses.

Harvard Business School professor and author Clay Christensen believes that you need to focus on the concept of the “job-to-be-done”; that is, when a customer buys a product, she is “hiring” it to do a particular job. Then there’s Brian Chesky of Airbnb, who said simply, “Build a product people love. Hire amazing people. What else is there to do? Everything else is fake work.” As Andrea Ovans aptly put it in her January 2015 Harvard Business Review article, “What Is a Business Model?”, it’s enough to make your head swim! For the purposes of this book, we’ll focus on the basic definition: a company’s business model describes how it generates financial returns by producing, selling, and supporting its products. What sets companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook apart, even from other successful high-tech companies, is that they have consistently been able to design and execute business models with characteristics that allow them to quickly achieve massive scale and sustainable competitive advantage. Of course, there isn’t a single perfect business model that works for every company, and trying to find one is a waste of time. But most great business models have certain characteristics in common. If you want to find your best business model, you should try to design one that maximizes four key growth factors and minimizes two key growth limiters.

It is even the same with schools. Important as good schools are, they prove totally undependable at rescuing bad neighborhoods and at creating good neighborhoods. Nor does a good school building guarantee a good education. Schools, like parks, are apt to be volatile creatures of their neighborhoods (as well as being creatures of larger policy). In bad neighborhoods, schools are brought to ruination, physically and socially; while successful neighborhoods improve their schools by fighting for them.*1

Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, more appreciative of what they’re getting, and far less entitled and competitive. They tend to act like peers instead of rivals.

The hope of many traditional investors is that markets will eventually reach a tipping point where they are so inefficient that it opens up a bonanza of lucrative opportunities for them to take advantage of. But so far there are no signs of that point approaching. Some analysts are skeptical that there will ever be a promised land of abundant alpha. Michael Mauboussin, one of Wall Street’s most pedigreed analysts and an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, has an apt metaphor to show how the hope among many active managers that index funds will eventually become so big that markets become easier to beat is likely in vain: Imagine that investing is akin to a poker game between a bunch of friends of varying skill. In all likelihood, the dimmer players will be the first to be forced out of the game and head home to nurse their losses. But that doesn’t mean that the game then becomes easier for the remaining cardsharps. In fact, it becomes harder, as the players still in the game are the best ones.24

This highly enigmatic concept of the storehouse consciousness, which some Western scholars have aptly or inaptly tried to liken to Jung's collective unconscious,

Not every ten-percenter is an excellent sheep, but a sufficient number are for you to think very carefully before deciding to surround yourself with them. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, more appreciative of what they’re getting, and far less entitled and competitive. They tend to act like peers instead of rivals.

We are apt to call things by wrong Names. We will have Prosperity to be Happiness, and Adversity to be Misery; though that is the School of Wisdom, and oftentimes the way to Eternal Happiness.

The next school year I had straight As again. We don’t really talk about it much as a society, but the expectation that teachers have for us and our level of comfort in the classroom dictates a lot of our success and “aptitude.” How can anyone be apt to do anything in a place where they feel not only underrepresented, but misrepresented and attacked?

We are apt to return to precisely the degree of intelligence that we possessed when certain difficulties arose in childhood and seared themselves across our neuronal pathways. Trauma keeps us as cognitively limited as we were when a given disaster struck us.

Shortly after Range came out, Ruth Brennan Morrey—a former college soccer co-captain and pro triathlete, Olympic Trials marathon qualifier, and psychology PhD—tagged me in an apt tweet: “Listening to @DavidEpstein ‘Range’ in the car with 12 year old daughter. ‘Mom, why do we make “What I want to be when I grow up” signs on the first day of school? We should make “Top 5 things I want to learn about this year” signs.’ Smart cookie. :-)” I think I’ll borrow the twelve-year-old’s idea.

Miss Mason: There are a thousand supplementary ways of giving such teaching; but these are apt to be casual and little binding if they do not rest upon the solid foundation of duty imposed upon us by God (so recognizing His authority), and due to each other, whether we will or no. This moral relation of person to person underlies all other relations. We owe it to the past to use its gains worthily and to advance from the point at which it left off. We owe it to the future to prepare a generation better than ourselves. We owe it to the present to live, to live with all expansion of heart and soul, all reaching out of our personality towards those relations appointed for us. We owe knowledge to the ignorant, comfort to the distressed, healing to the sick, reverence, courtesy and kindness to all men, especially to those with whom we are connected by ties of family or neighbourhood; and the sense of these dues does not come by nature.

What we must guard against in the training of children is the danger of their getting into the habit of being prodded to every duty and every effort. School marks, prizes, and exhibitions, are all prods; and a system of prodding is apt to obscure the meaning of must and ought for the boy or girl who gets into the habit of mental and moral slouching against his prods. It would be better for boys and girls to suffer the consequences of not doing their work, now and then, than to do it because they are so urged and prodded on all hands they have no volition in the matter. The more we are prodded the lazier we get, and the less capable of the effort of will which should carry us to, and nearly carry us through, our tasks.

On several occasions, I have met and spoken to retired men that once worked inside government facilities whose job was “tracking and storing” data. In every case, the higher they were, the more apt they were (upon retiring) to have no electronics such as iPhones, laptops, or smart televisions. They communicated the old school way, on a landline. Most were living in the country, far from cities where they grew their own food, drilled wells, raise cattle and chickens. At times, they will use special equipment and do “sweeps” of each room in their house or office to detect electronic listening devices. They are not hyper, but they are knowledgeable.

The point of view taken in this volume is, that all beautiful and noble possibilities are present in everyone; but that each person is subject to assault and hindrance in various ways, of which he should be aware in order that he may watch and pray. Hortatory teaching is apt to bore both young people and their elders; but an ordered presentation of the possibilities that lie in human nature, and of the risks that attend these, can hardly fail to have an enlightening and stimulating effect. This volume is intended as an appeal to the young to make the most of themselves, because of the vast possibilities that are in them and of the law of God which constrains them.

In order to remain whole as persons, we must appreciate the wholeness of knowledge. Our nature craves after unity. The travail of thought, which is going on to-day and has gone on as long as we have any record of men’s thoughts, has been with a view to establishing some principle for the unification of life. Here we have the scheme of a magnificent unity. We are apt to think that piety is one thing, that our intellectual and artistic yearnings are quite another matter, and that our moral virtues are pretty much matters of inheritance and environment, and have not much to do with our conscious religion. Hence, there come discords into our lives, discords especially trying to young and ardent souls who want to be good and religious, but who cannot escape from the overpowering drawings of art and intellect and mere physical enjoyment; they have been taught to consider that these things are, for the most part, alien to the religious life, and that they must choose one or the other; they do choose, and the choice does not always fall upon those things which, in our unscriptural and unphilosophical narrowness, we call the things of God. (School Education, pp. 154–55)

Compulsory, class-based education of young people by teachers in preparation for exams is one of those universal things nobody ever questions. We just assume that’s the way learning happens. But a quick reflection on our own experience shows that there are all sorts of other ways to learn. We learn by reading, by watching, by emulating, by doing. We learn in groups of friends, we learn alone. Yet almost none of this is called ‘education’ – which is always a top–down activity. Is the classroom really the best way for young people to learn things? Or has the obsession with formal education crowded out all sorts of other, more emergent models of learning? What would education look like if allowed to evolve? When you think about it, it is rather strange that liberated, freethinking people, when their children reach the age of five, send them off to a sort of prison for the next twelve to sixteen years. There they are held, on pain of punishment, in cells called classrooms and made, on pain of further punishment, to sit at desks and follow particular routines. Of course it is not as Dickensian as it used to be, and many people emerge with brilliant minds, but school is still a highly authoritarian and indoctrinating place. In my own case, the prison analogy was all too apt. The boarding school I attended between the ages of eight and twelve had such strict rules and such regular and painful corporal punishment that we readily identified with stories of prisoners of war in Nazi Germany, even down to the point of digging tunnels, saving up food and planning routes across the countryside to railway stations. Escapes were frequent, firmly punished, and generally considered heroic.

As Pauline Kael, Penelope Gillian, and all of those sober-sided film critics so often prove, no one is so humorless as a big-time film critic or so apt to read deep meanings into simple doings (“In The Fury,” Pauline Kael intoned, apparently in all seriousness, “Brian De Palma has found the junk heart of America.”)—it is as if these critics feel it necessary to prove and re-prove their own literacy; they are like teenage boys who feel obliged to demonstrate and redemonstrate their macho . . . perhaps most of all to themselves. This may be because they are working on the fringes of a field which deals entirely with pictures and the spoken word; they must surely be aware that while it requires at least a high school education to understand and appreciate all the facets of even such an accessible book as The Body Snatchers, any illiterate with four dollars in his or her pocket can go to a movie and find the junk heart of America. Movies are merely picture books that talk, and this seems to have left many literate movie critics with acute feelings of inferiority.

Ever since the Prajnā-Pāramitā-Sūtras, or the scriptures on the perfection of wisdom, practitioners of Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna have sought to cultivate the recognition that all phenomena are empty (shūnya): Everything that we could possibly point to, talk about, or even merely think of is a conceptual construct. Hence, according to the masters of Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna, nothing that is composite has any essence (sva-bhāva); everything is “without self” (nairātmya). In its most developed form—that of the Madhyamaka school founded by Nāgārjuna—this teaching came to mean that nothing is independently real. In his Madhyamaka-Kārikā (24.18), Nāgārjuna notes that it is the Buddha’s teaching of “dependent origination (pratītya-samutpāda) that we call ‘emptiness’ (shūnyatā).” Everything arises in dependence on causes and conditions or what in modern ecology is known as the “web of life” or “interconnectedness.” When we think of a star, for instance, we must admit that it is not so much a stable thing but a very complex process of limited duration. The same is true of our body, the mind, and every other conceivable thing. But in order to navigate in the world of appearances, we artificially construct a cosmos populated by stable things, as if these had inherent existence. The problem with this is that we begin to take them very seriously—including our body-mind—and start reacting either by attracting or rejecting them. In the case of our body, we even go so far as to identify with it, and as a result we suffer all kinds of negative consequences, notably the fear of death. The cure, according to Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna, is to cultivate the vision of emptiness, realizing of course that “emptiness” itself is a mental construct and therefore empty of inherent existence. Practitioners who forget this truth are apt to take shūnyatā itself as a definitive view (drishti) rather than as an antidote to all abstractions, which is the intended purpose. This kind of thinking has led to accusations of nihilism: that nothing whatsoever is real at any level and that nirvāna therefore is a completely meaningless and undesirable goal. In fact, both nihilism and realism are erroneous. Already the Buddha declined to speculate about the nature of nirvāna; he simply wanted to point a way to its realization. The Madhyamaka school simply developed this fundamental teaching along rigorous logical lines, focusing on the art of refutation of all possible metaphysical standpoints. But the language of emptiness is not meant to be merely a game of logic. Its real function is to shatter the conceptual mind and guide it to the truth about phenomena. For this emptiness must not only be understood intellectually but experienced through the cultivation of wisdom and compassion by means of the ten stages of the bodhisattva path.

Ever since the Prajnā-Pāramitā-Sūtras, or the scriptures on the perfection of wisdom, practitioners of Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna have sought to cultivate the recognition that all phenomena are empty (shūnya): Everything that we could possibly point to, talk about, or even merely think of is a conceptual construct. Hence, according to the masters of Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna, nothing that is composite has any essence (sva-bhāva); everything is “without self” (nairātmya). In its most developed form—that of the Madhyamaka school founded by Nāgārjuna—this teaching came to mean that nothing is independently real. In his Madhyamaka-Kārikā (24.18), Nāgārjuna notes that it is the Buddha’s teaching of “dependent origination (pratītya-samutpāda) that we call ‘emptiness’ (shūnyatā).” Everything arises in dependence on causes and conditions or what in modern ecology is known as the “web of life” or “interconnectedness.” When we think of a star, for instance, we must admit that it is not so much a stable thing but a very complex process of limited duration. The same is true of our body, the mind, and every other conceivable thing. But in order to navigate in the world of appearances, we artificially construct a cosmos populated by stable things, as if these had inherent existence. The problem with this is that we begin to take them very seriously—including our body-mind—and start reacting either by attracting or rejecting them. In the case of our body, we even go so far as to identify with it, and as a result we suffer all kinds of negative consequences, notably the fear of death. The cure, according to Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna, is to cultivate the vision of emptiness, realizing of course that “emptiness” itself is a mental construct and therefore empty of inherent existence. Practitioners who forget this truth are apt to take shūnyatā itself as a definitive view (drishti) rather than as an antidote to all abstractions, which is the intended purpose. This kind of thinking has led to accusations of nihilism: that nothing whatsoever is real at any level and that nirvāna therefore is a completely meaningless and undesirable goal. In fact, both nihilism and realism are erroneous. Already the Buddha declined to speculate about the nature of nirvāna; he simply wanted to point a way to its realization. The Madhyamaka school simply developed this fundamental teaching along rigorous logical lines, focusing on the art of refutation of all possible metaphysical standpoints. But the language of emptiness is not meant to be merely a game of logic. Its real function is to shatter the conceptual mind and guide it to the truth about phenomena. For this emptiness must not only be understood intellectually but experienced through the cultivation of wisdom and compassion by means of the ten stages of the bodhisattva path. The inherent selflessness or emptiness of beings notwithstanding, a bodhisattva is altruistically dedicated to their liberation.

A model boy rarely goes far, and even when he does he is apt to falter when severely tested. A boy who conforms immaculately to school rules is not likely to grow into a man who will conquer by breaking the stereotyped professional rules of his time, as conquest has most often been achieved. Still less does it imply the development of the wide views necessary in a man who is not merely a troop commander but the strategic adviser of his Government. The wonderful thing about Lee's generalship is not his legendary genius but the way he rose above his handicaps, handicaps that were internal even more than external.

Plura sunt quae nos terrent, quam quae premunt; et saepius opinione quam re laboramus. * There are more things to alarm than to afflict us, and we suffer much oftener from the apprehension than from the reality. We are apt to be more frightened than hurt.

In the name of safety and punishment, prison constraints prevent incarcerated men and women from becoming more educated, more skilled, more whole. In addition, the constraints render people less apt to reintegrate into our communities in productive, law-abiding ways. Detainees who participate in educational classes while incarcerated have a 13 percent higher chance of getting a job once they leave prison. More strikingly, they’re half as likely to break the law again. Yet two-thirds of American prisons have no means for detainees to take educational classes beyond the high school level.

Liberals don't know what they want. But they say"Watch for what you wish for it". 1990 I escaped from communist regime, I put my life in risk to have the freedom we have here in America and these idiots want communism. To some people Socialism and Communism might sound good but you have to give up a lot and you might get luckier if you know some one in the communist party or you can sell your soul to the devil to get the "FREE" stuff they offer. From free housing, but you don't get the house you want or when you wanted, you are luckily if you get 1 or 2 bedroom apt regardless the number of your family. or you might not get a house at all because elites always come 1st. that free health care come free death also because Dr.s decried you should live or die, the free schooling is for elites 1st then you maybe is is space in the classroom for your child. in Communism, Socialism, Islamism and Monarchy they all play the same rules is called "only one way." 1. Your freedom. 2. Freedom of speech. 3. Freedom of press. 4 Freedom of ownership. 5. Freedom of protection/Gun will be taken away. 6. You can't protest. 7. You don't choose who to vote. 8. You don't have any chooses they make the choices for you. 9. no religions believe at all. 10. Police can beat you up, can arrest you for no reason and get prosecuted for no reason and no one have right to an attorney because there don't exist one for you. Is this the life you LIBERALS/idiots want? Good luck on that but I'm pretty sure Americans are not ready to give up their freedom and their wealth for no one.

Henry Kissinger said "Control the Oil you can control a country, controle the food you can control the people" Some America liberals protest but they don't know why they protesting for. Some they say they don't like Republicans, to me it looks like they want government to pay for everything, There is a say "Watch for what you wish for it". 1990 I escaped from communist regime, I put my life in risk to gain the freedom we have here in America where many Americans take that for granted. "FREE" thinks are only in the communist system, basically they want other to pay for their housing , schooling, health care and so on... To some people Socialism and Communism might sound really good but you have to give up a lot and to get a little and you are luckier if you know some one to get the "FREE" stuff they offer. For example "fee" housing, but you don't get the house you want or when you wanted and you are luckily if you get 1 or 2 bedroom apt regardless the number of your family. or you might not get a house at all because elites and their friends and family always comes 1st. Oh ya that free health care come free death also because Dr.s decide who lives and who dies,and the free schooling is for elites and their friends and family 1st then you maybe is a free space in the classroom for your child. All I can say in any country where leaders dictate the luck of our life and our, freedoms has to be a Communism, Socialism, and Monarchy they all play the same rules is called "Only one way." Did you know even food sources is controlled from them.? They deceit how much your family need to eat. here is a list of privileges are taken away from you 1. Your Human Rights /freedom. 2. Freedom of speech. 3. Freedom of press. 4 Freedom of ownership. 5. Freedom of protection/Gun will be taken away. 6. You can't protest. 7. You don't choose who to vote. 8. You don't have any chooses they make the choices for you. 9. no religions believe at all. 10. Police can beat you up, can arrest you for no reason and get prosecuted for no reason and no one have right to an attorney because there don't exist one for you. Is this the life you LIBERALS want? Good luck on that but I'm pretty sure Americans are not ready to give up their freedom and their wealth for no one

Right now, higher education benefits from confusion in the market because schools can hide behind national averages on salaries and would-be students are more apt to trust a school’s marketing materials in the absence of better information.

That attention to a conspicuous problem may reduce interest in a more troubling one is sometimes consciously recognized but more often subconsciously sensed. (p. 27) Smith (2004) aptly applies Edelman’s theory

Battle is an apt metaphor for what we scientists do. There is a fierce competition that begins the day you declare yourself a physics major. First, among your fellow undergraduates, you spar for top ranking in your class. This leads to the next battle: becoming a graduate student at a top school. Then, you toil for six to eight years to earn a postdoc job at another top school. And finally, you hope, comes a coveted faculty job, which can become permanent if you are privileged enough to get tenure. Along the way, the number of peers in your group diminishes by a factor of ten at each stage, from hundreds of undergraduates to just one faculty job becoming available every few years in your field.

Battle is an apt metaphor for what we scientists do. There is a fierce competition that begins the day you declare yourself a physics major. First, among your fellow undergraduates, you spar for top ranking in your class. This leads to the next battle: becoming a graduate student at a top school. Then, you toil for six to eight years to earn a postdoc job at another top school. And finally, you hope, comes a coveted faculty job, which can become permanent if you are privileged enough to get tenure. Along the way, the number of peers in your group diminishes by a factor of ten at each stage, from hundreds of undergraduates to just one faculty job becoming available every few years in your field. Then the competition really begins, for you compete against fellow gladiators honed in battle just as you are. You compete for the scarcest resource in science: money.

The conclusion that race is a serious and durable social fault line is not a popular one in the social sciences. Many scholars have downplayed its importance, and have insisted that class differences are the real cause of social conflict. Political scientist Walker Connor, who has taught at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Cambridge, has sharply criticized his colleagues for ignoring ethnic loyalty, which he calls ethnonationalism. He wrote of “the school of thought called ‘nation-building’ that dominated the literature on political development, particularly in the United States after the Second World War:” 'The near total disregard of ethnonationalism that characterized the school, which numbered so many leading political scientists of the time, still astonishes. Again we encounter that divorce between intellectual theory and the real world.' He explained further: 'To the degree that ethnic identity is given recognition, it is apt to be as a somewhat unimportant and ephemeral nuisance that will unquestionably give way to a common identity . . . as modern communication and transportation networks link the state’s various parts more closely.' However: “There is little evidence of modern communications destroying ethnic consciousness, and much evidence of their augmenting it.” Prof. Connor came close to saying that any scholar who ignores ethnic loyalty is dishonest: '[H]e perceives those trends that he deems desirable as actually occurring, regardless of the factual situation. If the fact of ethnic nationalism is not compatible with his vision, it can thus be willed away. . . . [T]he treatment calls for total disregard or cavalier dismissal of the undesired facts.' This harsh judgment may not be unwarranted. Robert Putnam, mentioned above for his research on how racial diversity decreases trust in American neighborhoods, waited five years to publish his data. He was displeased with his findings, and worked very hard to find something other than racial diversity to explain why people in Maine and North Dakota trusted each other more than people in Los Angeles. Setting aside the reluctance academics may have for publishing data that conflict with current political ideals, Prof. Connor wrote that scholars discount racial or ethnic loyalty because of “the inherent limitations of rational inquiry into the realm of group identity.” Social scientists like to analyze political and economic interests because they are clear and rational, whereas Prof. Connor argues that rational calculations “hint not at all at the passions that motivate Kurdish, Tamil, and Tigre guerrillas or Basque, Corsican, Irish, and Palestinian terrorists.” As Chateaubriand noted in the 18th century: “Men don’t allow themselves to be killed for their interests; they allow themselves to be killed for their passions.” Prof. Connor adds that group loyalty is evoked “not through appeals to reason but through appeals to the emotions (appeals not to the mind but to the blood).” Academics do not like the unquantifiable, the emotional, the primitive—even if these things drive men harder than the practical and the rational—and are therefore inclined to downplay or even disregard them.

In his book, Doctors’ Marriages, Michael Myers includes an apt description of medical students’ burnout response. He writes, They acclimate to toxic environments and ways of managing stresses rather than changing things so that life is lived in a more self-nurturing manner. In short, they confuse the concepts of noble and normal. Wealth of coping strength actually pre-disposes you to making a fundamental stress-management mistake: because of your exceptional coping abilities, you are at risk of normalizing what is essentially an abnormal way of living; no matter how stressed you get, you are capable of going numb and pressing on.11

To sum up, for I've been speaking far too long," Sindermann was saying, "this recent episode allows us to observe genuine blood and sinew beneath the wordy skin of our philosophy. The truth we convey is the truth, because we say it is the truth. Is that enough?" He shrugged. "I don't believe so. ‘My truth is better than your truth’ is a school-yard squabble, not the basis of a culture. ‘I'm right, so you are wrong’ is a syllogism that collapses as soon as one applies any a number of fundamental ethical tools. I am right, ergo, you are wrong. We can't construct a constitution on that, and we cannot, should not, will not be persuaded to iterate on its basis. It would make us what?" He looked out across his audience. A number of hands were raised. "There?" "Liars." Sindermann smiled. His words were being amplified by the array of vox mics set around his podium, and his face magnified by picter onto the hololithic wall behind him. On the wall, his smile was three meters wide. "I was thinking bullies, or demagogues, Memed, but ‘liars’ is apt. In fact, it cuts deeper than my suggestions. Well done. Liars. That is the one thing we iterators can never allow ourselves to become.