Barrier Education Quotes

A strong woman builds her own world. She is one who is wise enough to know that it will attract the man she will gladly share it with.

To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination.

A Good Education Removes the Barriers Between Rich and Poor

Families are designed to nurture the minds, wills, and emotions of its members so that the barriers created by fear of the unknown can be replaced by the confidence that comes from knowing you are loved whether you succeed or fail.

Education is a liberating force, and in our age it is also a democratizing force, cutting across the barriers of caste and class, smoothing out inequalities imposed by birth and other circumstances.

Love has no distance or barrier, it's instantaneous.

Destroy all the barrier inside you and accept everyone with love. We are in each other all along. Be nonjudgmental but be loving.

I am pushing through every barrier to fulfill my dream.

Because you have honored God, He will put you in a position you never could have attained on your own. It’s not just your education, not just your talent, or the family you come from. It’s the hand of God shifting you to a new level of your destiny.

My philosophy of equity feminism demands removal of all barriers to women’s advancement in the political and professional realms. However, I oppose special protections for women in the workplace. Treating women as more vulnerable, virtuous, or credible than men is reactionary, regressive, and ultimately counterproductive.

Class consciousness is not one of our national diseases; we suffer, indeed, from its opposite--the delusion that class barriers are not real. That delusion reveals itself in many forms, some of them as beautiful as a glass eye. One is the Liberal doctrine that a prairie demagogue promoted to the United States Senate will instantly show all the sagacity of a Metternich ... another is the doctrine that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will cease thereby to be a moron ...

If every book was judged by its cover, very few would be read; education would be limited, and fewer movies would be made.

Thoughts have no barrier.

If you're unloved then find out and destroy all the barriers that you have created against love.

Destroy all the barriers inside you and accept everyone with love. We are in each other all along. Be nonjudgmental but be loving. Find the perfection in imperfection and be happy.

Unfortunately we find systems of education today that have departed so far from the plain truth that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bounds imposed by one’s ignorance. To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of this great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in a measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation.

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. We are destined to be a barrier against the returns of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can. What a Colossus shall we be when the Southern continent comes up to our mark! What a stand will it secure as a ralliance for the reason & freedom of the globe! I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. So good night. I will dream on, always fancying that Mrs Adams and yourself are by my side marking the progress and the obliquities of ages and countries.

Education that gives priority to measurement rather than values, to efficiency rather than conscience, to information rather than ethics, provides no barrier to barbarity and violence. The Holocaust was perpetrated by a society of the most disciplined, highly educated people on earth.

You may be surprised and encouraged to learn that while inability to deal with fear may look and feel like a psychological problem, in most cases it isn’t. I believe it is primarily an educational problem, and that by reeducating the mind, you can accept fear as simply a fact of life rather than a barrier to success.

Books open and broaden our minds allowing us to challenge ourselves to become more than we are, by setting positive goals for ourselves, and overcoming doubts about our ability to receive the education we want to achieve.

The debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.

Single-strand identities do not exist in a household, let alone in a nation. When America is at its best, we acknowledge the complexity of our societies and the complicating reality of how we experience this country—and its obstacles. Yet we never lose sight of the fact that we all want the same thing. We want education. We want economic security. We want health care. Identity politics pushes leaders to understand that because of race, class, gender, sexual orientation/gender identity, and national origin, people confront obstacles that stem from these identities. Successful leaders who wish to engage the broadest coalition of voters have to demonstrate that they understand that the barriers are not uniform and, moreover, that they have plans to tackle these impediments. The greatest politicians display both of these capacities, and they never forget that the destination—regardless of identity—is the same: safety, security, and opportunity.

During the interviews, many women associated shame with educators and helping professionals. As an educator, I was not at all surprised to hear shame identified as an issue in the classroom. In fact I believe that shame is one of the greatest barriers to learning. I’m afraid the social-community pressure to appear learned has become more important than actually learning. When we spend our time and energy building and protecting our image of “knowing,” it is highly unlikely that we will risk admitting we don’t understand or asking questions—both of which are essential to real knowledge building.

Liberalism is the ideology at the center of conservative arguments against affirmative action and equal opportunity. By proposing that, all things being equal, everyone has the same opportunity to compete in the U.S. marketplace, success is determined by how hard someone works and not by their economic class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or race. Ethnic and racial identities are to be assimilated, lost, and erased through the celebrated "melting pot" of U.S. culture. Liberalism thus devalues the importance of communitarian experiences and social identities as determinants or barriers to individual success. Instead, it proposes that all individuals are fundamentally equal and that, regardless of their social identity, everyone can control his or her fate through hard work, learned skills, and acquired education- the foundational myth of a U.S. meritocracy.

We are not born with fixed abilities, and those who achieve at the highest level do not do so because of their genetics. They myth that our brains are fixed and that we simply don't have the aptitude for certain topics is not only scientifically inaccurate; it is omnipresent and negatively impacts education and many other events in our everyday lives.

With persistent perseverance, you can break through any barrier.

When it comes to competing with the best and brightest in whatever your talents or educational skills are, you have to have the confidence within yourself that you are able to achieve.

The most tragic error into which older people can fall is one that is common among educators and politicians. It is to use youth as scapegoats for the sins of their elders. Is the nation wasting its young men and its honor in an unjust war? Never mind — direct your frustration at the long-haired young people who are shouting in the streets that the war must end. Curse them as hippies and immoral, dirty fanatics; after all, we older Americans could not have been wrong about anything important, because our hearts are all in the right place and God is always on our side, so anyone who opposes us must be insane, and probably in the pay of the godless Communists. Youth is in the process of being classed with the dark- skinned minorities as the object of popular scorn and hatred. It    is   as  if  Americans  have  to  have  a  "nigger,"  a  target                             for its hidden frustrations and guilt. Without someone to blame, like the Communists abroad and the young and black at home, middle America would be forced to consider whether all the problems of our time were in any way its own fault. That is the one thing it could never stand to do. Hence, it finds scapegoats. Few adults, I am afraid, will ever break free of the crippling attitudes that have been programmed into their personalities – racism, self-righteousness, lack of concern for the losers of the world, and an excessive regard for property. One reason, as I have noted, is that they do not know they are like this, and that they proclaim ideals that are the reverse of many of their actions. Such hypocrisy, even if it is unconscious, is the real barrier between them and their children.

To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination. Surely, this process is not relationship, but mere imposition, and it is therefore essential to understand the difficult and complex desire to dominate. It takes many subtle forms; and in its self-righteous aspect, it is very obstinate. The desire to "serve" with the unconscious longing to dominate is difficult to understand. Can there be love where there is possessiveness? Can we be in communion with those whom we seek to control? To dominate is to use another for self-gratification, and where there is the use of another there is no love. When there is love there is consideration, not only for the children but for every human being. Unless we are deeply touched by the problem, we will never find the right way of education. Mere technical training inevitably makes for ruthlessness, and to educate our children we must be sensitive to the whole movement of life. What we think, what we do, what we say matters infinitely, because it creates the environment, and the environment either helps or hinders the child. Obviously, then, those of us who are deeply interested in this problem will have to begin to understand ourselves and thereby help to transform society; we will make it our direct responsability to bring about a new approach to education. If we love our children, will we not find a way of putting an end to war? But if we are merely using the word "love" without substance, then the whole complex problem of human misery will remain. The way out of this problem lies through ourselves. We must begin to understand our relationship with our fellow men, with nature, with ideas and with things, for without that understanding there is no hope, there is no way out of conflict and suffering. The bringing up of a child requires intelligent observation and care. Experts and their knowledge can never replace the parents' love, but most parents corrupt that love by their own fears and ambitions, which condition and distort the outlook of the child. So few of us are concerned with love, but we are vastly taken up with the appearance of love. The present educational and social structure does not help the individual towards freedom and integration; and if the parents are at all in earnest and desire that the child shall grow to his fullest integral capacity, they must begin to alter the influence of the home and set about creating schools with the right kind of educators. The influence of the home and that of the school must not be in any way contradictory, so both parents and teachers must re-educate themselves. The contradiction which so often exists between the private life of the individual and his life as a member of the group creates an endless battle within himself and in his relationships. This conflict is encouraged and sustained through the wrong kind of education, and both governments and organized religions add to the confusion by their contradictory doctrines. The child is divided within himself from the very start, which results in personal and social disasters.

Today, books are cheaper than ever. Courses are free. Access to teachers is no longer a barrier—technology has done away with that. There is no excuse for not getting your education, and because the information we have before us is so vast, there is no excuse for ever ending that process either.

That’s why the gender imbalance in unpaid work is so significant: The unpaid work a woman does in the home is a barrier to the activities that can advance her—getting more education, earning outside income, meeting with other women, becoming politically active. Unequal unpaid work blocks a woman’s path to empowerment.

Limits on people's capacities to conduct activities that are essential to everyday life are imposed by structural and systemic barriers. These barriers are part of a social system that regards some bodies as "normal" and some as "other", rather than considering a broad range of bodies and possibilities, for example when designing a building or piece of furniture. This relegates people with disabilities to the status of lesser citizens because of their lack of access. Disability is a byproduct of a society which is organized around only certain bodies which are defined as "normal", in laws, education, institutions, and in popular culture.

In reality, Japanese women face many societal barriers to equality. Of course, the barriers that I’ll now describe also exist in countries other than Japan. But those barriers are stronger—and the gender gap in health, education, and participation in the workforce and in politics is greater—in Japan than in any other rich industrialized nation except South Korea.

The function of education is to create human beings who are integrated and, therefore, intelligent. We may take degrees and be mechanically efficient without being intelligent. Intelligence is not mere information; it is not derived from books, nor does it consist of clever self-defensive responses and aggressive assertions. One who has not studied may be more intelligent than the learned. We have made examinations and degrees the criterion of intelligence and have developed cunning minds that avoid vital human issues. Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education. Education should help us to discover lasting values so that we do not merely cling to formulas or repeat slogans; it should help us to break down our national and social barriers, instead of emphasizing them, for they breed antagonism between man and man. Unfortunately, the present system of education is making us subservient, mechanical, and deeply thoughtless; though it awakens us intellectually, inwardly it leaves us incomplete, stultified, and uncreative.

Every human is born with a birthright. That birthright is happiness. Our greatest challenge to achieving happiness is not the obstacles we encounter in our life. The true barrier to happiness lies inside of us—and it’s the one thing we can’t ever escape: our own mind. From birth, we are educated on countless aspects of life, from personal hygiene to personal finance, but there is no widely accepted curriculum for understanding and managing our minds.

Education should help us to discover lasting values so that we do not merely cling to formulas or repeat slogans; it should help us to break down our national and social barriers, instead of emphasizing them, for they breed antagonism between man and man. Unfortunately, the present system of education is making us subservient, mechanical, and deeply thoughtless; though it awakens us intellectually, inwardly it leaves us incomplete, stultified, and uncreative.

At least a dozen different so-called good institutions have been identified. Without attempting to rank them in order of importance, but just listing them alphabetically, they include: control of inflation, educational opportunities, effectiveness of government, enforcement of contracts, freedom from trade barriers, incentives and opportunities for investment of capital, lack of corruption, low risk of assassination, open currency exchange, protection of private property rights, rule of law,

The Chinese government assigns capital to everything. Infrastructure development. Industrial plant buildout. Transport systems. Educational systems. Health systems. Everything and anything that puts people in jobs. Excruciatingly little of it would qualify as “wise capital allocation.” The goal isn’t efficiency or profitability, but instead achieving the singular political goal of overcoming regional, geographic, climatic, demographic, ethnic, and millennia of historical barriers to unity. No price is too high.

Make school affordable. For example, provide family stipends for keeping girls in school. Help girls overcome health barriers. For example, offer deworming treatments. Reduce the time and distance to get to school. For example, provide girls with bikes. Make schools more girl-friendly. For example, offer child-care programs for young mothers. Improve school quality. For example, invest in more and better teachers. Increase community engagement. For example, train community education activists. Sustain girls’ education during emergencies. For example, establish schools in refugee camps. Today,

Words can never adequately convey the incredible impact of our attitude.… I believe the single most important decision I can make on a day-to-day basis is my attitude choice. It’s more important than my past. It’s more important than my education or my bankroll or my success or my failures. My attitude choice is more important than my fame or my pain or what others think or say about me or my position or my circumstances. Attitudes keep me going or cripple my progress. Attitude alone fuels my fire or assaults my hope. When my attitude is right, there is no barrier too high nor valley too deep nor dream too extreme nor challenge too great for me.2

But China’s mandatory household registration system, the hukou, presents a significant barrier for this type of match. Citizens from the countryside are not allowed to move to urban areas without state approval. The prospect of more desirable employment lures many to cities anyway, but even if they find a good job, they are barred from accessing urban health care, education, and housing benefits. And since children inherit their mother’s hukou status, no self-respecting urban bachelor wants to marry a poor girl from the sticks—unless they are truly in love, and in which case, everyone lives happily ever after. Except for the woman and her children, who, because of their hukou, are essentially illegal aliens in their own country.

Spoiling Argument is a kind of argument that begins when one partner deliberately –and for no immediately obvious reason – attempts to spoil the good mood and high spirits of the other. On the surface it looks as if we’re simply monsters. But if we dig a little deeper a more understandable (though no less regrettable) picture may emerge. We are acting in this way because our partner’s buoyant and breezy mood can come across as a forbidding barrier to communication. We fear that their current happiness could prevent them from knowing the shame or melancholy, worry or loneliness that presently possesses us. A dark instinct in our minds experiences our partner’s upbeat mood as a warning that our uncheery parts must now be unwelcome and are, through their remorseless negativity, in a garbled and maddening way begging us for reassurance.

If you are writing for an educated audience and, to take an example, you use the phrase mutatis mutandis, you are not showing off—you are communicating. You are using words to do what words are supposed to do. It reminds me of the time that someone complained to William F. Buckley about all the unusual words that he would employ. His reply was that the words were not unusual to him. Words are there for a reason, and foreign phrases can often do the trick that more homey phrases cannot. But if you are blogging about your adventures as a shopping mom, and you write about your purchase of a 48-pack of corn dogs at Costco, and you describe them as de provenance étrangère, it had better be a joke. Unusual words or phrases (foreign and domestic) are a barrier to understanding, unless the point is to communicate to the reader that you know something they don't. Then they understand what you are doing quite well.

Every human is born with a birthright. That birthright is happiness. Our greatest challenge to achieving happiness is not the obstacles we encounter in our life. The true barrier to happiness lies inside of us—and it’s the one thing we can’t ever escape: our own mind. From birth, we are educated on countless aspects of life, from personal hygiene to personal finance, but there is no widely accepted curriculum for understanding and managing our minds. Indeed, almost every human remains the victim of their own mind throughout their entire life, never learning to master it, or manage it, or even understand it. The Birthright was written to change that. This book is an owner’s manual for a human mind. If you read it and do the maintenance it recommends, your mind will run smoothly. It will break down less often, and in the end, it will take you to your birthright. Indeed, a well-tuned mind is the only road to true and lasting happiness. Owen

Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers (such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families.72 The urge to empower students by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s has eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all.73 The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.

I'm often asked if I'm a feminist. This I suspect has something to do with the fact that I write a column called Fe-mail and most people lack imagination. My answer is always a firm 'now' because I refuse to have my femininity define me or indeed put me on the back foot. Life is already full of challenges, why make my gender another one? It's just too exhausting, and ultimately, I suspect, futile. I am not fighting to prove my worth or my ability as a woman, but rather as a person. And of course I speak not on behalf of, or against, millions of women across the world who must forcibly negotiate cultures, religions, societies, or families that genuinely oppress (sometimes in the most brutal ways) but rather those women-educated and free-who cry foul at the merest hint of male dominance. Chill the F^*k out and just get on with your own life. Because you know what? All those nasty evil men you're huffing and puffing about, they're not giving you a moment's thought. They're too busy aggressively going after what they want with no thought of barriers or blocks or unfair this or that.

Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers (such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families.72 The urge to empower students by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s has eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all.73 The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.74 On issue after issue, it’s as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such “reforms” may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.

This matter of not being able to understand may not be as drastic as you make it out. Of course two peoples and two languages will never be able to communicate with each other so intimately as two individuals who belong to the same nation and speak the same language. But that is no reason to forgo the effort at communication. Within nations there are also barriers which stand in the way of complete communication and complete mutual understanding, barriers of culture, education, talent, individuality. It might be asserted that every human being on earth can fundamentally hold a dialogue with every other human being, and it might also be asserted that there are no two persons in the world between whom genuine, whole, intimate understanding is possible - the one statement is as true as the other. It is Yin and Yang, day and night; both are right and at times we have to be reminded of both. To be sure, I too do not believe that you and I will ever be able to communicate fully, and without some residue of misunderstanding, with each other. But though you may be an occidental and I a Chinese, though we may speak different languages, if we are men of good will we shall have a great deal to say to each other, and beyond what is precisely communicable we can guess and sense a great deal about each other. At any rate let us try.

In order to grasp the meaning of this liberal program we need to imagine a world order in which liberalism is supreme. Either all the states in it are liberal, or enough are so that when united they are able to repulse an attack of militarist aggressors. In this liberal world, or liberal part of the world, there is private property in the means of production. The working of the market is not hampered by government interference. There are no trade barriers; men can live and work where they want. Frontiers are drawn on the maps but they do not hinder the migrations of men and shipping of commodities. Natives do not enjoy rights that are denied to aliens. Governments and their servants restrict their activities to the protection of life, health, and property against fraudulent or violent aggression. They do not discriminate against foreigners. The courts are independent and effectively protect everybody against the encroachments of officialdom. Everyone is permitted to say, to write, and to print what he likes. Education is not subject to government interference. Governments are like night-watchmen whom the citizens have entrusted with the task of handling the police power. The men in office are regarded as mortal men, not as superhuman beings or as paternal authorities who have the right and duty to hold the people in tutelage. Governments do not have the power to dictate to the citizens what language they must use in their daily speech or in what language they must bring up and educate their children. Administrative organs and tribunals are bound to use each man’s language in dealing with him, provided this language is spoken in the district by a reasonable number of residents. In such a world it makes no difference where the frontiers of a country are drawn. Nobody has a special material interest in enlarging the territory of the state in which he lives; nobody suffers loss if a part of this area is separated from the state. It is also immaterial whether all parts of the state’s territory are in direct geographical connection, or whether they are separated by a piece of land belonging to another state. It is of no economic importance whether the country has a frontage on the ocean or not. In such a world the people of every village or district could decide by plebiscite to which state they wanted to belong. There would be no more wars because there would be no incentive for aggression. War would not pay. Armies and navies would be superfluous. Policemen would suffice for the fight against crime. In such a world the state is not a metaphysical entity but simply the producer of security and peace. It is the night-watchman, as Lassalle contemptuously dubbed it. But it fulfills this task in a satisfactory way. The citizen’s sleep is not disturbed, bombs do not destroy his home, and if somebody knocks at his door late at night it is certainly neither the Gestapo nor the O.G.P.U. The reality in which we have to live differs very much from this perfect world of ideal liberalism. But this is due only to the fact that men have rejected liberalism for etatism.

A committed escaper! One who never for a minute doubts that a man cannot live behind bars—not even as the most comfortable of trusties, in the accounts office, in the Culture and Education Section, or in charge of the bread ration. One who once he lands in prison spends every waking hour thinking about escape and dreams of escape at night. One who has vowed never to resign himself, and subordinates every action to his need to escape. One for whom a day in prison can never be just another day; there are only days of preparation for escape, days on the run, and days in the punishment cells after recapture and a beating. A committed escaper! This means one who knows what he is undertaking. One who has seen the bullet-riddled bodies of other escapers on display along the central tract. He has also seen those brought back alive—like the man who was taken from hut to hut, black and blue and coughing blood, and made o shout: "Prisoners! Look at what happened to me! It can happen to you, too!" He knows that a runaway's body is usually too heavy to be delivered to camp. And that therefore the head alone is brought back in a duffel bag, sometimes (this is more reliable proof, according to the rulebook) together with the right arm, chopped off at the elbow, so that the Special Section can check the fingerprints and write the man off. A committed escaper! It is for his benefit that window bars are set in cement, that the camp area is encircled with dozens of strands of barbed wire, towers, fences, reinforced barriers, that ambushes and booby traps are set, that red meat is fed to gray dogs.

He calls the resulting phenomenon ‘capitalist realism’, defined as the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it … a pervasive atmosphere conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining action.11

We are having an ongoing and critical conversation about race in America. The question on many minds, the question that is certainly on my mind, is how do we prevent racial injustices from happening? How do we protect young black children? How do we overcome so many of the institutional barriers that exacerbate racism and poverty? It’s a nice idea that we could simply follow a prescribed set of rules and make the world a better place for all. It’s a nice idea that racism is a finite problem for which there is a finite solution, and that respectability, perhaps, could have saved all the people who have lost their lives to the effects of racism. But we don’t live in that world and it’s dangerous to suggest that the targets of oppression are wholly responsible for ending that oppression. Respectability politics suggest that there’s a way for us to all be model (read: like white) citizens. We can always be better, but will we ever be ideal? Do we even want to be ideal, or is there a way for us to become more comfortably human? Take, for example, someone like Don Lemon. He is a black man, raised by a single mother, and now he is a successful news anchor for a major news network. His outlook seems driven by the notion that if he can make it, anyone can. This is the ethos espoused by people who believe in respectability politics. Because they have achieved success, because they have transcended, in some way, the effects of racism or other forms of discrimination, all people should be able to do the same. In truth, they have climbed a ladder and shattered a glass ceiling but are seemingly uninterested in extending that ladder as far as it needs to reach so that others may climb. They are uninterested in providing a detailed blueprint for how they achieved their success. They are unwilling to consider that until the institutional problems are solved, no blueprint for success can possibly exist. For real progress to be made, leaders like Lemon and Cosby need to at least acknowledge reality. Respectability politics are not the answer to ending racism. Racism doesn’t care about respectability, wealth, education, or status. Oprah Winfrey, one of the wealthiest people in the world and certainly the wealthiest black woman in the world, openly discusses the racism she continues to encounter in her daily life. In July 2013, while in Zurich to attend Tina Turner’s wedding, Winfrey was informed by a store clerk at the Trois Pommes boutique that the purse she was interested in was too expensive for her. We don’t need to cry for Oprah, prevented from buying an obscenely overpriced purse, but we can recognize the incident as one more reminder that racism is so pervasive and pernicious that we will never be respectable enough to outrun racism, not here in the United States, not anywhere in the world.

If my students are to meet every inch of their academic potential, I must understand the barriers to education that exist for them.

Change comes, when every person is adequately benefited. We keep hearing about “change.” Change will never come to all of society. Change can only come when the market system adequately provide all of the needs for all people. Millions are living in poverty in the United States and throughout the world, due to “change” passed them by, are struggling: Among them are high unemployment, the mentally challenged, poor education, many of them are homeless and hungry, sick and tired; such individuals, look for ways to move beyond their prison walls that hold them back from moving forward: Through the corridors of their prison, they observe the wealthy getting wealthier. They see the market system passing them at a fast rate of speed. Hope has long left the majority of them. There is a price that must be paid for the sins of those who have built these prisons.

Workers who campaigned for Populist tickets were blacklisted and could not find jobs. Barriers to voting, such as the poll tax or education requirements, were stiffened. Press aligned with one party or the other “systematically played on racial, sectional, and class fears to alert readers to the Populist menace.

These changes have been steadily eroding the barrier between scholarship and activism. It used to be considered a failure of teaching or scholarship to work from a particular ideological standpoint. The teacher or scholar was expected to set aside her own biases and beliefs in order to approach her subject as objectively as possible. Academics were incentivized to do so by knowing that other scholars could—and would—point out evidence of bias or motivated reasoning and counter it with evidence and argument. Teachers could consider their attempts at objectivity successful if their students did not know what their political or ideological positions were. This is not how Social Justice scholarship works or is applied to education. Teaching is now supposed to be a political act, and only one type of politics is acceptable—identity politics, as defined by Social Justice and Theory. In subjects ranging from gender studies to English literature, it is now perfectly acceptable to state a theoretical or ideological position and then use that lens to examine the material, without making any attempt to falsify one’s interpretation by including disconfirming evidence or alternative explanations. Now, scholars can openly declare themselves to be activists and teach activism in courses that require students to accept the ideological basis of Social Justice as true and produce work that supports it.38 One particularly infamous 2016 paper in Géneros: Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies even favorably likened women’s studies to HIV and Ebola, advocating that it spread its version of feminism like an immune-suppressing virus, using students-turned-activists as carriers.39

Conventional wisdom in the West held that nominally secular Arab generals and royal autocrats were “better” for women than political Islamists, but under the rule of such leaders, women faced multiple binds: they had to contend with the patriarchy of their culture, which frowned on women being educated and working; they had to struggle with the structural barriers to accessing work and education in societies like Tunisia that rejected religious women accessing public life—and at the very same time could not organize to challenge these norms through politics, because secular dictators didn’t allow any politics at all.

A sensory education seems to have the potential to free up a child from many of the old barriers to trying new food.

An education is a powerful lever that improves—but doesn’t guarantee—the chances that someone can overcome adversity and make it in spite of the barriers. The myth of the American dream really is a myth.

Education, a force meant to erode class barriers, now fortifies them.

their previous education in India had prepared them for an entirely different cultural context than the one in which they were now teaching. Other features of culture may have mattered more in India, like religion or socioeconomic status, though the teachers did not acknowledge this themselves, but race was not one of those salient features. Additionally, their agencies and communities in the United States did not provide appropriate, contextualized, and continuous education for them. Thus, the spectacle of constructing bridges was, in reality, the building of barriers. FOUR Barriers

Because whiteness is so often treated as invisible, as if only non-Whites are racially and ethnically positioned, White teachers often are particularly afraid to name their own positionality. Identity, including whiteness, is not absolute or fixed; rather, identity is always changing and evolving. Yet we contend that the denial of the existence of the educator’s own positionality creates more barriers and a lack of trust, especially when students are asked so often to name theirs. When an educator’s whiteness is unnamed, it remains in a dominant position, reinforcing that it is the noncolor color by which all other colors are measured.

Fascist regimes set out to make the new man and the new woman (each in his or her proper sphere). It was the challenging task of fascist educational systems to manufacture “new” men and women who were simultaneously fighters and obedient subjects. Educational systems in liberal states, alongside their mission to help individuals realize their intellectual potential, were already committed to shaping citizens. Fascist states were able to use existing educational personnel and structures with only a shift of emphasis toward sports and physical and military training. Some of the schools’ traditional functions were absorbed, to be sure, by party parallel organizations like the obligatory youth movements. All children in fascist states were supposed to be enrolled automatically in party organizations that structured their lives from childhood through university. Close to 70 percent of Italians aged six to twenty-one in the northern cities of Turin, Genoa, and Milan belonged to Fascist youth organizations, though the proportion was much lower in the undeveloped south. Hitler was even more determined to take young Germans away from their traditional socializers—parents, schoolteachers, churche —and their traditional spontaneous amusements. “These boys,” he told the Reichstag on December 4, 1938, “join our organization at the age of ten and get a breath of fresh air for the first time; then, four years later, they move from the Jungvolk to the Hitler Youth and there we keep them for another four years. And then we are even less prepared to give them back into the hands of those who create our class and status barriers, rather we take them immediately into the Party, into the Labor Front, into the SA or the SS . . . and so on.”117 Between the end of 1932 and the beginning of 1939, the Hitlerjugend expanded its share of the ten-to-eighteen age group from 1 percent to 87 percent.118 Once out in the world, the citizens of a fascist state found the regime watching over their leisure-time activities as well: the Dopolavoro in Italy and the Kraft durch Freude in Germany.

This is the central barrier to understanding evolution. We understand time through the experience of our own short lives. To truly imagine three and a half billion years is virtually impossible. Imagine yourself living to seventy-I mean really imagine seventy years: being born, a decade and a half of education, many more decades of employment, wars, elections, scientific discoveries, parents lost, middle age, old age-innumerable memories marked off by seventy birthdays and seventy summers and winters. Now try to imagine fifty million of those lifetimes-fifty million of them! Because that is how long life has been developing on earth. But how can you begin to conceive of such an expanse of time? Try this. If, at a modest clip-which I'd recommend, given what I'm proposing-it takes you a minute to count out loud to a hundred, it will take you almost a week of nonstop counting to reach a million. That is, counting without a single break and no sleep. If you could keep counting for twenty-four hours a day for 350 days, you'd reach fifty million. But these are not just meaningless numbers-each one of them represents a lifetime. But almost a year without sleep is inconceivable, so let's try and make it "doable", as Behe would say. Put in eight hours of counting a day, seven days a week. Take a two-week vacation each year. Under these still-harsh working conditions (no weekends off), it will now take you three years to count out these fifty million lifetimes. (You will reach, incidentally, the birth of Christ within the first half minute, and the oldest age of the earth, according to believers in a literal Genesis, within the first two minutes.) But to really comprehend this expanse of time, you would still have to be capable of imagining-as each of those numbers came tripping off your tongue, hour after hour, week after week, month after month, year after year, for three years-that each of those numbers signified a lifetime. Even if you chose to do this, and even if you were capable of the extraordinary effort of will and imagination needed to conceive of what you were actually doing, I suspect that at the end of it you would still be only a little closer to comprehending the vast amount of time involved. In all probability, you would give up long before you finished, overwhelmed by depression at your own insignificance. It is offensive to one's sense of self to imagine this huge expanse of time that came before you and within which you had no relevance. No, it is more than offensive; it is terrifying. How much easier-and how much more comforting-to just put in those first two minutes and imagine, in one way or another, a designer who placed you at the center of it all.

As the most privileged and skilled immigrants from China and Japan entered the US, the stereotype of Asian Americans in the US changed to one of a cultural inclination for academic and business success—ignoring the fact that the majority of Chinese and Japanese people who were unable to immigrate did not enjoy the same high levels of income or education. As that myth took hold, it did not adjust to accommodate the vastly different social, educational, and economic circumstances that Asian refugees were coming from as they fled countries like Vietnam and Cambodia. Nor did it account for the social and economic barriers they, like many other refugee populations, would face when they arrived in the US.

The struggle for educational freedom does not somehow vanish when you apply theory, but your barriers are no longer hiding in plain sight; now you have the language, understanding, and, hopefully, coconspirators not only to fight but also to demand what is needed to thrive.

Super Mario Bros. hooks newcomers because there are no barriers to playing the game. You can know absolutely nothing about the Nintendo console and still enjoy yourself from the very first minute. There's no need to read motivation-sapping manuals or grind through educational tutorials before you begin. Instead, your avatar, Mario appears on the left-hand side of an almost empty screen. Because the screen is empty, you can push the Nintendo controller's buttons randomly and harmlessly, learning which ones make Mario jump and which ones make him move left and right. You can't move any further left, so you quickly learn to move right. And you aren't reading a guide that tells you which keys are which--instead, you're learning by doing, and enjoying the sense of mastery comes from acquiring knowledge through experience. The first few seconds of gameplay are brilliantly designed to simultaneously do two very difficult things: teach, and preserve the illusion that nothing is being taught at all.

Education means nourishing the mind and make it develop in order to see beyond the limitations of current social perception - it means breaking the barriers of the rugged sociological system that impede in the progress of human civilization - it means trying out new things for the first time in human history and succeeding in a few while failing in some. And that is how a species grows to become more advanced.

We North Americans are fortunate that our ancestors, frontier colonists and emigrants, were forced to develop for survival a pragmatic, positive attitude toward inventions and mechanisms. It helped us a great deal to make the most out of the first centuries of industrialization. Unfortunately, the cultural heritage in some of the nations that need industrialization most is very different and constitutes a barrier to urgently needed technical development. Throughout India, for example, so many young people choose to be educated for "clean" desk jobs that the nation now has an unusable surplus of office workers, and many civil servants face mandatory retirement at the age of fifty.

The education profession cannot bear but success. Failing in it is just a proof of poor visions, or lack of educational efficiencies. Both should be excluded from the educational work that should be protected from any barrier that would block its way, and would deprive the generation from getting the overall upbringing that should build a solid relationship between the students and knowledge.

As an Asian American woman within black radical circles, Grace surely was anomalous, but this raised no significant concerns or barriers to her participation in various black organizations, struggles, and movements. While she never attempted to conceal her ethnic identity, Grace developed a political identity as a black movement activist—that is, an activist based in a black community and operating within black movements. Living with Jimmy in a black community in the 1950s and immersing herself in the social and political worlds of black Detroit, she solidified this political identity through her activism. By the early 1960s she was firmly situated within a network of activists building organizations, staging protests, and engaging in a range of grassroots political initiatives. By mid-decade, when the Black Power movement emerged, Grace was a fixture within black radical politics in Detroit and widely known in movement circles nationally. Together, Jimmy and Grace helped to build a vibrant local black protest community in Detroit, the city that served not only as their home and political base, but also as a catalyst for new ideas about social change. They formulated their theories through grassroots activism in the context of—and at times directly in response to—the tremendous urban transformation experienced by the Motor City during the decades following World War II. Alongside their local efforts, the couple forged an ever-widening network of activists, artists, and intellectuals across the country, engaging multiple spaces of black activist politics. A diverse group of younger black activists from Detroit and across the country visited their eastside Detroit home—“ the Boggses’ University,” as one of them labeled it. 2 Each received theoretical training, political education, and a sense of historical continuity between past and future struggles. Through their extraordinary partnership James and Grace Lee Boggs built several organizations, undertook innumerable local activist initiatives, produced an array of theoretical and political writings, and mentored a generation of activists.

Principal Fazil was chiefly concerned with maintaining discipline, which required a proper harmony and order between, on the one hand, ther children of respectable families, who in class always sat in the front rows, and, on the other hand, the throngs of poorer boys. He had developed his own brand of thinking on this subject and shared it every Monday during the flag-raising ceremony, distilled as a slogan: "A good education removes the barriers between rich and poor!" Mevlut wasn't quite sure whether Principal Fazil meant to say to his poorer students, "If you study hard and finish school, you, too, will be rich," or whether he meant, "If you study hard and finish school, no one will notice how poor you are.

There are good reasons why people with different experiences tend to have incompatible understandings of the world. But as the educated and wealthy pull further away from everyone else, those disparities are becoming enshrined in impermeable cultural barriers.

If a child or teen is struggling to manage emotions or make good choices, it is rarely because they want to be “bad” or disrespectful. I ask you to consider that there is likely a barrier keeping these children from being successful, and it is our job as the adults who care for them to coach them through it.

It is human nature to avoid being concerned with the welfare of the less privileged. So often I have observed those a little more fortunate walk by with stiff backs and upturned noses, as though they are infallible, removed from the suffering of humanity. So often the more fortunate assume an air of ridicule and contempt towards men of humbler birth. Out island is not free from discrimination, although it may be subtle and disguised. If you escape the race barrier, there is still that of higher income, and in some circles, that of a high school education.

The apocalyptic belief in the consummation of history, the inevitability of socialism, and the natural sequence of 'social formations'; the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', the exhalation of violence, faith in the automatic efficacy of nationalizing industry, fantasies concerning a society without conflict and an economy without money—all these have nothing to do with the idea of democratic socialism. The latter's purpose is to create institutions which can gradually reduce the subordination of production to profit, do away with poverty, diminish inequality, remove social barriers to educational opportunity, and minimize the threat to democratic liberties from state bureaucracy and the seductions of totalitarianism.

Wealth is where history shows up in your wallet, where your financial freedom is determined by compounding interest on decisions made long before you were born. That is why the Black-white wealth gap is growing despite gains in Black education and earnings, and why the typical Black household owns only $17,600 in assets. Still, having little to no intergenerational wealth and facing massive systemic barriers, descendants of a stolen people have given America the touch-tone telephone, the carbon filament in the lightbulb, the gas mask, the modern traffic light, blood banks, the gas furnace, open-heart surgery, and the mathematics to enable the moon landing. Just imagine the possibilities if—in addition to rebuilding the pathways for all aspirants to the American Dream—we gave millions more Black Americans the life-changing freedom that a modest amount of wealth affords. A 2020 Citigroup report calculated that “if racial gaps for Blacks had been closed 20 years ago, U.S. GDP could have benefitted by an estimated $16 trillion.

I have read so many books . . . And yet, like most autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading—and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading, and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she’s been attentively reading the menu. Apparently this combination of ability and blindness is a symptom exclusive to the autodidact. Deprived of the steady guiding hand that any good education provides, the autodidact possesses nonetheless the gift of freedom and conciseness of thought, where official discourse would put up barriers and prohibit adventure.

Right-wing populist movements appeal to historically dominant population groups that have been left behind economically relative to their expectations: the poorly educated, those who live in rural areas, and workers who have lost jobs because of international trade.18 Arguments made by the leaders of right-wing populist movements for trade barriers and immigration restrictions fall on willing ears. But rather than explicitly appeal to class identity or distributive justice, the leaders of right-wing populist movements appeal to the ethno-nationalist creed of “blood and soil.” These groups look nostalgically back to a past when people like them enjoyed greater economic security and higher status.

Just as computer science was erecting barriers to entry, medicine—an equally competitive and selective field—was adjusting them. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, dozens of new medical schools opened across the country, and many of the newly created spots went to women. Standardized entry exams also began to change. In 1977, the MCAT, a test for entrance into medical school, was revamped to reduce cultural and social bias. But the game changer was the implementation of Title IX, which prohibits sexual discrimination in educational programs. From then on, if a woman could score high enough on the newly revised MCATs and meet other requirements, med schools could not legally deny her entry, and women poured in. Why wasn’t the same progress being made in computer science? Professor Eric Roberts, now at Stanford, was chairing the computer science department at Wellesley when the department instituted a GPA threshold. Of that period he later wrote, “In the 1970s, students were welcomed eagerly into this new and exciting field. Around 1984, everything changed. Instead of welcoming students, departments began trying to push them away.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an official in the U.S. Department of Labor, called the inner cities after the arrival of the southern migrants “a tangle of pathology.” He argued that what had attracted southerners like Ida Mae, George, and Robert was welfare: “the differential in payments between jurisdictions has to encourage some migration toward urban centers in the North,” he wrote, adding his own italics. Their reputation had preceded them. It had not been good. Neither was it accurate. The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants. “It is the higher status segments of a population which are most residentially mobile,” the sociologists Karl and Alma Taeuber wrote in a 1965 analysis of census data on the migrants, published the same year as the Moynihan Report. “As the distance of migration increases,” wrote the migration scholar Everett Lee, “the migrants become an increasingly superior group.” Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found. “Migrants who overcome a considerable set of intervening obstacles do so for compelling reasons, and such migrations are not taken lightly,” Lee wrote. “Intervening obstacles serve to weed out some of the weak or the incapable.” The South had erected some of the highest barriers to migration of any people seeking to leave one place for another in this country. By the time the migrants made it out, they were likely willing to do whatever it took to make it, so as not to have to return south and admit defeat. It would be decades before census data could be further analyzed and bear out these observations. One myth they had to overcome was that they were bedraggled hayseeds just off the plantation. Census figures paint a different picture. By the 1930s, nearly two out of every three colored migrants to the big cities of the North and West were coming from towns or cities in the South, as did George Starling and Robert Foster, rather than straight from the field. “The move to northern cities was dominated by urban southerners,” wrote the scholar J. Trent Alexander. Thus the latter wave of migrants brought a higher level of sophistication than was assumed at the time. “Most Negro migrants to northern metropolitan areas have had considerable previous experience with urban living,” the Taeuber study observed. Overall, southern migrants represented the most educated segment of the southern black population they left, the sociologist Stewart Tolnay wrote in 1998. In 1940 and 1950, colored people who left the South “averaged nearly two more years of completed schooling than those who remained in the South.” That middle wave of migrants found themselves, on average, more than two years behind the blacks they encountered

school showed Geronimus something else. The girls weren’t losing out on higher education, careers, and other opportunities as a result of pregnancy. Those advantages didn’t exist in their communities. Plus, getting pregnant wasn’t necessarily a drag on the young women; many of them were experienced with raising children, having helped care for siblings and other family members. Inspired by the book All Our Kin, the anthropologist Carol B. Stack’s ethnography of three years in a low-income Black community, Geronimus understood that many of the young women lived in a warm embrace of family and community support, or kin, in stark contrast to the popular image of the “ghetto” as deficient and dysfunctional. She started to see that societal barriers, inequality, and lack of choices, not teen pregnancy, were the origin of the socioeconomic problems the Black community was struggling against.

The problem of our times, however, is that the intellect has taken on a disproportionately important role. Modern education has encouraged a completely lopsided development of this aspect of the mind. The essence of the intellect is to divide. So humanity has embarked on a journey of wholesale division, discrimination, and dissection. We have split everything. Even the invisible atom has been split. Once you unleash the intellect, it splits everything it encounters; it does not allow you to be with anything totally. Although it is a wonderful instrument for survival, it is also at the same time a terrible barrier that stands between you and your experience of the oneness of life.

[October 06, 2022 Statement from President Biden on Marijuana Reform] As I often said during my campaign for President, no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana. Sending people to prison for possessing marijuana has upended too many lives and incarcerated people for conduct that many states no longer prohibit. Criminal records for marijuana possession have also imposed needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities. And while white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionate rates. Today, I am announcing three steps that I am taking to end this failed approach. First, I am announcing a pardon of all prior Federal offenses of simple possession of marijuana. I have directed the Attorney General to develop an administrative process for the issuance of certificates of pardon to eligible individuals. There are thousands of people who have prior Federal convictions for marijuana possession, who may be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities as a result. My action will help relieve the collateral consequences arising from these convictions. Second, I am urging all Governors to do the same with regard to state offenses. Just as no one should be in a Federal prison solely due to the possession of marijuana, no one should be in a local jail or state prison for that reason, either. Third, I am asking the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Attorney General to initiate the administrative process to review expeditiously how marijuana is scheduled under federal law. Federal law currently classifies marijuana in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, the classification meant for the most dangerous substances. This is the same schedule as for heroin and LSD, and even higher than the classification of fentanyl and methamphetamine – the drugs that are driving our overdose epidemic. Finally, even as federal and state regulation of marijuana changes, important limitations on trafficking, marketing, and under-age sales should stay in place. Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. It’s time that we right these wrongs.

But here’s the deeper irony. You are not the same. Life is a dynamic, ongoing process. Change is always happening, and decline can happen quickly and quietly. As someone once said, “You’re either growing or you’re dying. There’s no standing still.” Even trying to stand still is risky. Other people in your life, your work, and in your world aren’t standing still. Especially in the twenty-first century, planning to stay the same is really planning to be left behind. The world moves forward, our careers demand more of us, our relationships face more barriers to successful communication, our children are raised in a different universe than we were. We need to grow just to stay influential in their lives. We can lose connections with our own families and if we don’t continue our education throughout our lives.

With the de-collectivization of the welfare state, there is also the growing danger of downward mobility and the stigmatization bound up with this. Unemployment, low pay, poverty, reduced prospects, and so forth were previously not considered personal deficiencies, but rather the shared collective fate of a class. Class milieus propagated and handed down ‘sustaining counter-interpretations, forms of defence and support’.107 Through individualization, this previously collective fate becomes the personal fate of the ‘market individual’. The dependency of our society on education precisely reinforces this process. Education may be a universal value, but it also draws new barriers.

Considering eighteenth-century social mores, Franklin assembled an incredibly divergent mix for the time: rich and poor, young and old, clerk and merchant alike. These were all white men, of course, but for his time, Franklin was breaking down barriers. Every Friday evening, the Junto would congregate to share the essays its members had written on subjects of personal interest. A debate on ethics or natural philosophy, aka scientific inquiry, might follow. To ensure civility, the group levied small fines for direct criticism or personal attacks. Many of these men had no higher education, but they were curious, intellectually intrepid, and, of course, avid readers. Franklin made sure of that in selecting them.

Every human is born with a birthright. That birthright is happiness. Our greatest challenge to achieving happiness is not the obstacles we encounter in our life. The true barrier to happiness lies inside of us—and it’s the one thing we can’t ever escape: our own mind. “From birth, we are educated on countless aspects of life on earth, from personal hygiene to personal finance, but there is no widely accepted curriculum for understanding and managing our own minds. Indeed, almost every human remains the victim of their own mind throughout their entire life, never learning to master it, or manage it, or even understand it. The Birthright was written to change that. This book is an owner’s manual for a human mind. If you read it and do the maintenance it recommends, your mind will run smoothly. It will break down less often, and in the end, it will take you to your birthright. Indeed, a well-tuned mind is the only road to true and lasting happiness.

.... freedom from an interfering government is not the only barrier to genuine autonomy. The right to reflect is not universal. It is a privilege afforded to those of us in affluent societies who have time to spare, and who are not otherwise burdened by fundamental problems, like poverty, malnutrition or ill health, problems that, at least in male-dominated societies, women suffer disproportionately. Add to this women’s lack of equality under the law in those same societies, as well as their lack of equal access to education and basic social institutions of welfare, and it becomes clear that it is not just women’s bodies but their basic human rights that are under attack in male-dominated societies.

So what are the barriers to an Arab “start-up nation”? The answer includes oil, limits on political liberties, the status of women, and the quality of education.

That never could have happened if he hadn’t been a guy. For one, girls aren’t allowed to wear onesies to school. They’re deemed immodest. Because, you know, distracting female bodies pose a huge educational barrier for the poor boys. And if a girl had done that zany dance, either it’d have been sexualized or it’d have been stupid, depending on the girl. “She’s hot,” people would say. Or “She’s weird.” That morning, leaving Town Meeting, everyone was jostling one another, still in high spirits. “Andy is so out there.” Voices dripping with admiration. “He’s such a…” They couldn’t even finish. No words. Shake head. Smile, smile, smile. What they meant, of course, was this: Andy Monroe is so, so freaking cool. Right after that dance—still in the onesie!—he tapped the mike and said, “Next announcement. The Service Club is hosting a winter-coat drive on behalf of the Coalition for the Homeless.” A girl wouldn’t be allowed to bridge both worlds, the silly and the sober. To be taken seriously, she’d have to act serious, and her seriousness would make her unelectable—just as a lack of seriousness would. It was a quintessential catch-22, and we couldn’t even call it out, because it sounded like an excuse. Well, I could be that cool, if I were a guy…. We couldn’t say it, but we felt it. We felt it as surely as we felt the weight of our bodies, because, like gravity, it was a truth about how it worked, this world we knew. Girls didn’t even consider running for Chawton School chairman because, as girls, we knew, we knew deep in our bones, that we would always lose.

Whereas the analytic-synthetic distinction considers some statements absolutely certain and others merely probable, with a rigid barrier between these two categories, it seems more accurate to say there are degrees of belief and certainty throughout one's worldview. Some beliefs are held more firmly than others; some beliefs are held more passionately than others. But the firmly held beliefs are not necessarily the so-called analytic ones, in that they are not trivial, nor are they necessarily self-evident (though they will at least seem to be self-evident to the one who holds them at the center of his network). What determines the strength of a belief is far more complex than the analytic-synthetic distinction will allow. Such factors as past experience, upbringing, self protection, cultural and social background, intelligence level, educational training, stubbornness, pride, prejudice, religious convictions, and so on, can all influence the way we hold our beliefs and the way we revise them. It may be said that our belief system is regulated and controlled by our most basic beliefs, or presuppositions, which are neither trivial analytic truths nor purely observational synthetic truths. Or, to put it another way, everyone will end up treating some beliefs with the authority and certainty of 'analytic' judgements, but give them the significance of 'synthetic' judgements...In other words, not all beliefs are of equal importance to us. Some beliefs are granted virtual immunity from revision while others are held quite loosely. Some are at the center of the web, others on the periphery. But the strength of any given belief is not determined automictically; it is determined in the overall context of one's beliefs...Of course, this does not drive us to a form of relativism. To construe it as such would be to ignore the fact that not all presuppositional networks are equally valid. Some worldviews, or webs, are philosophically stronger than others. Some clearly destroy the intelligibility of human predication and experience and therefore must be rejected.

Bigotry is a poison that corrodes the very fabric of humanity, staining our hearts with prejudice and our minds with ignorance. It is a destructive force that thrives on fear, division, and the rejection of our shared humanity. To combat bigotry is to dismantle the barriers that separate us, to recognize the inherent worth of every individual, regardless of their race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. It is to embrace diversity as a source of strength, understanding that our differences are what make us beautifully unique. Bigotry blinds us to the richness of the tapestry of human existence, condemning us to a world of narrow-mindedness and intolerance. It stifles progress, stifles progress, hampers empathy, and perpetuates injustice. It is an affront to the principles of equality and the fundamental rights we all deserve. Confronting bigotry requires courage, empathy, and a commitment to unlearn the biases ingrained within us. It is an ongoing process that demands self-reflection and a willingness to challenge our own preconceived notions. It is about standing up against discrimination in all its forms, whether overt or subtle, and refusing to be complicit in the face of injustice. In the fight against bigotry, we must be vigilant and steadfast, for it is not enough to be non-racist or non-discriminatory; we must actively be anti-bigotry. We must use our voices to amplify the silenced, to advocate for change, and to build bridges of understanding where there were once walls of prejudice. Let us remember that the power to eradicate bigotry lies within each and every one of us. It is through education, dialogue, and empathy that we can dismantle the walls of hatred and forge a society built on acceptance, respect, and love. Together, let us be the fierce advocates for equality, the beacons of hope in the face of darkness, and the champions of a world where bigotry has no place. For in the unity of our actions, we can create a future where every individual can flourish, and where the radiant tapestry of humanity shines in all its glory.

There is only one way for women to reach full human potential—by participating in the mainstream of society, by exercising their own voice in all the decisions shaping that society. For women to have full identity and freedom, they must have economic independence. Breaking through the barriers that had kept them from the jobs and professions rewarded by society was the first step, but it wasn’t sufficient. It would be necessary to change the rules of the game to restructure professions, marriage, the family, the home. The manner in which offices and hospitals are structured, along the rigid, separate, unequal, unbridgeable lines of secretary/executive, nurse/doctor, embodies and perpetuates the feminine mystique. But the economic part would never be complete unless a dollar value was somehow put on the work done by women in the home, at least in terms of social security, pensions, retirement pay. And housework and child rearing would have to be more equally shared by husband, wife, and society. Equality and human dignity are not possible for women if they are not able to earn. When the young radical kids came into the movement, they said it was “boring” or “reformist” or “capitalist co-option” to place so much emphasis on jobs and education. But very few women can afford to ignore the elementary economic facts of life. Only economic independence can free a woman to marry for love, not for status or financial support, or to leave a loveless, intolerable, humiliating marriage, or to eat, dress, rest, and move if she plans not to marry. But the importance of work for women goes beyond economics. How else can women participate in the action and decisions of an advanced industrial society unless they have the training and opportunity and skills that come from participating in it?

[Bernardo Ruiz] Suarez observed, “The White race is haughty and domineering everywhere. In those countries where religion, education, and other influences have softened the hearts of men, the sentiment of brotherhood tends to level the inequalities and barriers of race, and to give reality to that form of society, which in political science is called: democracy.” Suarez warned, that the United States lacked “the sentiment of brotherhood altogether.” But the race which colonized and still forms the majority of the people of the United States, with its historical antecedents and its degrading record of bloodshed, cannot be classified, in the opinion of an impartial observer, as a democratic race. The refusal of people in Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, and other nations to submit quietly to US power inspired African Americans trying to ward off racial capitalism’s blows in the United States throughout the 20th century. Veterans of the war on the government of American banks, would have taken exception to a later generation of scholars who characterized the United States as either isolationist or democratic. The insurgent citizenry of the Americas, who faced the colossus of the north, would have scoffed at the idea that the United States was not an empire. The opponents of the US military invasions of the early 20th century, demanded that the United States be held accountable for its overseas depredations. Instead, historians shrouded the country’s history in a veil of innocence and exceptionalism, which has undermined the nation’s ability to reform itself to this day. It cannot be said that scholars lacked sources that could have guided them to the truth. Suarez, whose nation had dealt with US power for decades, spoke for many in the Global South in 1922 when he concluded, “No matter what is said to the contrary, and there is much truth that may be said, the United States of America have by no means lived up to their professed abhorence of autocracy and aggressive imperialism in their international affairs.

digital whiteboards have emerged as transformative tools, reshaping the dynamics of education and professional collaboration. Their evolution continues to break down barriers, fostering interactive, engaging, and inclusive environments that propel learning and innovation forward.

Fathom.com couldn’t give standard Columbia diplomas to people who took its classes because they didn’t satisfy the second or third criteria. So it inadvertently conducted an experiment to determine the market price of online Columbia courses based only on their educational value. The answer turned out to be: almost nothing. The gates around higher education were more than just physical barriers to entry. There was a wall of regulation, money, habit, and social capital surrounding the industry, keeping competitors at bay. Even as technology wrought profound changes in society around them, hybrid universities grew richer and more expensive than they had ever been.

Sazi is fortunate to be born of parents that are comparable enough to be able to see the impact of both nature and nurture. Even better is that no longer can allegations about women’s progress in life be attributed to society and ‘the patriarchy’ holding them back. Since 1994 there has been a concerted focus on directing taxpayer-funded programs to the upliftment of women; from educational programs at school, admission and funding of tertiary programs for women to employment and business funding that explicitly exclude boys and men. This ought to mean comparable men and women ought to achieve the same outcomes since there are essentially no differences between men and women. Lawmakers have implemented programs aimed at empowering and uplifting girls and women. These initiatives have actively sought to address the claimed long-standing societal and patriarchal barriers that have hindered their progress. So based on this, the difference in the sex of parents no longer favours men thus making comparing outcomes possible.

The Mizrahim continue to face educational and cultural disadvantages, which mostly reflects class barriers justified by racist ideology. This is fundamentally distinct from the national oppression of the Palestinians.

her education had created a barrier and obstacle that he must overcome.